Avanti!

Avanti! is the flagship newspaper of Italian socialism and a recurring focal point in the conflict between socialist organization and Fascist violence. Its significance lies not only in what it prints but in what it represents: a durable platform for workers’ politics, a shared past for former comrades, and a physical institution that its attackers seek to silence. Benito Mussolini’s movement can assault the paper’s offices, but its brief closure and promised return make clear that destroying a press does not automatically extinguish the constituency gathered around it.

A socialist institution and Mussolini’s former role

Before the war, Benito Mussolini rose to prominence within official socialism as editor of Avanti!, the newspaper that guided the socialist movement. He was widely esteemed in that role, and even former comrades acknowledged his unusual ability to understand and interpret the proletariat. His swift change from advocating absolute neutrality to supporting intervention in the war was therefore experienced as a betrayal by people who had once admired him. The newspaper gives that break a concrete institutional shape: Mussolini had not merely changed an abstract political position but turned away from a movement whose ideas and readership he had helped address.

The distance between his former post and his later politics remains visible in the paper’s presence near his own working world. Avanti!’s offices stood on Via San Damiano, close to the Arditi quarters on Via Cerva and to the editorial office of Mussolini’s Il Popolo d’Italia. The proximity places rival political cultures in adjacent rooms and streets. In one, the editor who once spoke for socialism now builds a new movement; nearby, the socialist paper continues to publish and to gather its staff.

A gathering place for political antagonism

The paper’s identity is also carried by the people who work around it. During an evening when Mussolini sits with the Arditi, staff members in the neighboring private room sing a socialist anthem and toast the February 17 demonstration. That procession had brought tens of thousands of striking workers into Milan, accompanied by bands and red flags. Its demands and its visible challenge to the meaning of victory unsettled the nationalist public Mussolini addressed. The neighboring rooms thus hold more than different opinions: they embody rival interpretations of the postwar order, with the socialist gathering recalling mass protest and the Fascist circle treating that mobilization as a threat.

Mussolini’s response to the socialists’ open hostility is cautious rather than immediate. When insults against him are heard, Albino Volpi shifts his grip on a knife, but Mussolini stops him with a slight movement. The episode makes the paper’s political role tangible: even before the attack on its premises, it is a nearby source of speech that can provoke retaliation. Mussolini had already answered the February demonstration in print, pledging to defend the war dead against what he considered an affront. His editorial threat to resist even in the city’s streets helped frame political disagreement as a struggle over who could claim the dead and the nation.

The April 1919 assault and the destruction of the presses

In April 1919, Fascist attackers reach the Milan headquarters of Avanti! on Via San Damiano. Uniformed soldiers initially form a cordon around the building, but the defense is half-hearted; many of the activists on the attacking side had been their commanders during the war. After a guard is killed by a shot from inside, the cordon opens to let the stretcher through, and the attackers enter. By then, the socialist defenders have left through the back of the building.

The assault proceeds as deliberate destruction rather than a contest for control of an occupied office. The attackers overturn furniture, wreck typewriters and filing cabinets, damage the historical archive, and scatter material prepared for distribution. The rotary presses present a different obstacle: unlike desks or smaller equipment, they cannot simply be broken with clubs and daggers. A former printer among the attackers uses his knowledge of the machinery to force it into operation in a way that destroys it. The scene gives the destruction an especially pointed meaning: a worker trained in the craft of revolutionary publication turns that expertise against the means of producing it.

Within half an hour, the building is burning. Police watch alongside the people who set the fire, and firefighters are prevented from intervening while it burns. The attack therefore extends beyond the assailants’ actions inside the premises. The official forces present do not restore the paper’s protection, and the fire is allowed to consume the building. Avanti! is silenced for a day, but the Milan section of the Italian Socialist Party announces that it will resume publication the following day, more forcefully in defense of its rights. Its appeal also records the solidarity of the Italian proletariat and calls for work to resume, presenting publication and organized labor as forms of continuity after the attack.

Repeated attacks and the paper’s political afterlife

The burning does not end the danger. In March 1921, Pietro Nenni rushes to defend the same newspaper during a second Fascist attack, having moved from republican sympathy for Fascism to socialism. His trajectory crosses the paper’s own history: in 1919 he had helped establish the first Fasci di Combattimento in Bologna and welcomed the devastation of Avanti!; two years later, he stands on the opposite side, defending the publication whose destruction he had once applauded. The reversal shows how the newspaper remains a site around which political identities are made and remade, not simply a relic of Mussolini’s earlier socialist life.

A later assault is described as the third attempt to burn the premises. As Gabriele D’Annunzio appeals publicly for brotherhood among workers, squads associated with Cesare Forni and Roberto Farinacci prepare to attack Avanti! again. The contrast between the appeal and the planned raid exposes the distance between conciliatory language and political practice. The paper’s archives and premises remain vulnerable, but its repeated reappearance keeps the conflict visible: every attempt to silence it confirms that it continues to matter as a voice and an institution.

The newspaper as a measure of political change

Avanti! traces a larger transformation without ceasing to be a specific newspaper with offices, staff, archives, and presses. It begins in the narrative as the institution through which Mussolini earned socialist prominence; after his break with socialism, it becomes a rival platform and a target of organized violence. The attacks move from threat and public hostility to the destruction of equipment and the burning of the building, then recur even after the paper has pledged to return. Its material vulnerability stands beside its political persistence.

That contrast gives the newspaper its lasting narrative force. A press can be wrecked, an archive damaged, and an office set alight; the readership and labor politics it represents are harder to erase. The paper’s temporary silence is answered by the promise of renewed publication, while former allies and adversaries change sides around it. Avanti! therefore serves as both a record of Mussolini’s distance from his socialist past and a recurring measure of how far Fascist power is prepared to go to suppress organized opposition.