Ferrara is presented as a city and province where the contest between socialist organization and Fascist violence became a visible struggle for control of public life. Its electoral arithmetic initially favored the socialists, but funerals, armed expeditions, intimidation, and alliances with landowners altered the balance. Ferrara’s significance lies not only in the clashes themselves: it becomes the setting in which local power is reorganized, Italo Balbo rises, and violence is converted into political authority.

Electoral Strength and Revolutionary Tension

In the November 1919 parliamentary election, the Socialist Party won 43,000 votes in the province of Ferrara. The following year, the local administrative elections again showed the weakness of the anti-revolutionary parties: their bloc received fewer than 7,000 votes across the province. The electoral result did not settle the conflict. The account describes a province in which political competition was increasingly treated as a contest over control of the state and the prospect of revolution.

After the local elections, prefect Eugenio De Carlo reported an incendiary situation to Rome. His account included five Carabinieri beaten in Fossana, voters escorted to polling stations under pressure, and growing administrative abuses. The socialist platform drew on an agenda advanced by Giuseppe Gugino, who openly described participation in elections as a means of gaining access to state machinery for revolutionary purposes. The narrative sets this local tension alongside revolutionary developments elsewhere, presenting Ferrara as part of a wider postwar crisis rather than an isolated dispute.

Ferrara’s political divisions also ran through organized labor and the countryside. Ercole Bucco, a labor organizer active in the Ferrara and Mantua areas, was described as boycotting agreements even when they might benefit peasants, thereby preventing compromise. His stance made the prospect of agreement seem increasingly remote. In the account, the crucial issue was not simply which party could win an election, but whether institutions could still contain the opposing movements.

The Castle Clash and the Funeral Procession

In December 1920, three Fascists were killed in clashes with socialists outside the Estense Castle, the seat of the socialist provincial government. The violence occurred amid an already changing balance of forces: only a month earlier, anti-revolutionary parties had polled fewer than 7,000 votes across the province. Grenades found in the castle, which the socialists had brought in preparation for defense, gave the attackers an opportunity to transfer blame for the clash onto their opponents. The event’s political meaning was shaped as much by that reversal of responsibility as by the deaths themselves.

The government in Rome removed the prefect, making him a scapegoat, and offered a reward of 20,000 lire for information about those described as the murderers. Socialist leaders, including the mayor, Temistocle Bogianckino, and figures associated with the Chamber of Labor, were threatened and insulted. The local socialist newspaper La scintilla stopped publishing. The account contrasts this retreat with the treatment of the dead Fascists: they were honored as martyrs, while the death of Giovanni Mirella, a socialist nurse killed in the clashes, was attributed to the Popular Party.

The funeral for the three Fascists became a public demonstration of changed allegiance. Speakers recalled that Franco Gozzi had managed to establish only five Fascist circles in the province, while the same year saw 192 barn fires attributed to the reds. Their small numbers in the face of a much larger socialist presence were recast as evidence of courage. After the ceremony, roughly a thousand Fascists returned to the city center in formation. Merchants, landowners, professionals, artisans, and other members of the bourgeoisie made way for them. The working class was absent from the streets described in this scene; the city center, in the narrative’s formulation, emerged from its lethargy to welcome the procession. The funeral thus did more than honor the dead: it turned their deaths into a continuing political claim.

Balbo and the Organization of Violence

Italo Balbo’s association with Ferrara begins in the account as a chance encounter with that funeral. A twenty-four-year-old captain of the Alpini, he had served in the final offensive on Monte Grappa and received military decorations. After leaving the army, he had held a prefectural post in Friuli, where he fell in love with Emanuela Florio. He was in his native city for the Christmas holidays and attended the ceremony by chance. The episode places a decorated veteran, not yet established as the province’s dominant Fascist leader, at the moment when the funeral procession displays the movement’s new public strength.

A month later, on January 23, 1921, a punitive expedition set out from Ferrara toward nearby rural settlements. It was organized according to military methods: dozens of armed men planned to strike several targets simultaneously, including peasant leagues in San Martino, Aguscello, Cona, Fossanova San Biagio, Denore, and Fossanova San Marco. Trucks supplied by the Agrarian Association made the operation possible. The expedition depended on planning, mobility, and surprise, and its scale distinguished it from a spontaneous street clash.

This campaign also exposed divisions within the Fascist organization. Olao Gaggioli, founder of the Ferrara Fascio, had resigned as its secretary in December in protest against Benito Mussolini’s break with Gabriele D’Annunzio and the influence of agrarian interests. His departure mattered because he had been present at the founding meeting in Milan, served in the Arditi, and taken part in the occupation of Palazzo d’Accursio and earlier clashes in Ferrara. His protest showed that the movement’s local growth did not mean internal agreement: disputes over landowners, political direction, and the relationship with D’Annunzio continued even as the squads expanded their operations.

Ferrara and Matteotti’s Expulsion

Ferrara’s squads also reached beyond the city. On March 12, 1921, Giacomo Matteotti attended a political meeting in Castelguglielmo, in the province of Rovigo, accompanied by the mayor of Pincara. Fascists had gathered from across the province, including men from nearby Ferrara. They forced Matteotti to sign declarations renouncing his political commitments; he refused. They then set fire to the peasant league’s headquarters, put him on a truck, drove him around the countryside, and abandoned him near Lendinara. The account makes clear that this was not an event inside Ferrara itself, but it links the city’s organized squads to the wider campaign that drove political opponents from public life. Matteotti was warned that his survival depended on leaving the province and not returning.

Ferrara’s urban geography adds a further measure of the violence’s reach. Via Croce Bianca, Via Sacca, Via Colomba, and especially Via delle Volte are identified as streets containing brothels, places where politics was conventionally understood to be kept outside. Yet the account describes these sites as part of the local atmosphere surrounding the abuse of Matteotti: squadristi were regular customers, and the story of his treatment became a subject of crude public talk. Later, amid a separate conflict within Ferrara’s Fascist ranks, dissidents were tracked down even in the brothels of Via Croce Bianca, spaces that Fascists had treated as places of asylum. The supposed boundary between private refuge and political violence therefore failed precisely where the city’s social life might have seemed most insulated.

Balbo’s Local Power and Its Fragility

After the March on Rome, Balbo strengthened his control over Ferrara. In the December administrative elections, the socialists did not run, and the Fascists won throughout the province without opposition. Balbo reinforced his alliance with the agrarians by changing municipal taxes to their advantage and placing associates, relatives, and even dissidents in influential positions in local administration and the party. The arrangement appeared to make the province governable through personal authority and carefully managed alliances.

That order was unstable. With spring came unemployment among seasonal farmhands, and their hunger intensified the discontent of Fascist dissidents. The founder of the city’s Fascio left in protest against what he called a clique; others resigned rather than serve agrarian interests at the expense of peasants. After Alfredo Misuri was beaten, hostile graffiti appeared on city walls, naming both Mussolini and Balbo as targets. Balbo responded indirectly: while presenting himself as occupied with disciplining the national militia, he sent Dino Grandi to oversee the city Fascio and arranged for six trusted militiamen from Perugia to suppress dissent. By the end of June, the dissidents had been scattered and Tommaso Beltrami had returned to command.

The killing of Don Giovanni Minzoni in nearby Argenta brought the limits of this system into view. Minzoni had opposed Fascism, organized young Catholics and workers outside Fascist unions, and drawn support from socialist peasants. After he was killed in August 1923, Balbo considered the threat the murder posed to his position in Ferrara. Beltrami delivered a public statement disavowing the perpetrators, but Balbo also urged that the matter be hushed up. Ferrara’s story thus moves from a funeral that made violence publicly useful to a killing whose political consequences demanded concealment. Across the province, the same power that claimed to restore order relied on organized force, fragile alliances, and the management of what could be said about that force.