Florence

Florence is one of the book’s principal settings for the unsettled politics of postwar Italy. Its streets bring together demobilized veterans, workers, socialists, and aspiring Fascists, making the city a stage on which the promises of victory collide with unemployment, resentment, and political intimidation. From a wounded veteran’s search for assistance to the faltering local Fascist organization and its clashes with opponents, Florence shows how national crisis took shape in daily urban life.

A city of veterans and disillusionment

The city’s postwar atmosphere is framed by the return of millions of soldiers to a society that offers neither secure work nor an unambiguous welcome. In Florence, a former Arditi leaves the military hospital on Via dei Mille with a slight limp and his left arm in a sling. His open assault-battalion jacket, black flames on the collar, and visible dagger mark him as a veteran of the war even as his injuries make ordinary movement difficult. Passersby give him room. At the hospital, other former assault troops share his anger: they had been discharged without ceremony, after months of military discipline imposed once the fighting was over. They believe politicians acted to avoid provoking those who had opposed the war, while veterans returned to civilian life without public recognition.

The veteran makes his way along Via degli Artisti, through borgo dei Pinti, toward the center, hoping the Confraternità della Misericordia might have work for him in its public transport service for disabled people. His search brings the wider grievance down to a practical question of livelihood. He and his comrades believe that men who risked their lives for the country have returned to find their jobs taken by people who stayed home. The comparison with victorious veterans elsewhere sharpens their sense of exclusion: they see no parade, compensation, or welcome for Italy’s soldiers. The account places this frustration beside Florence’s monumental beauty. The Duomo’s polychrome marble and Brunelleschi’s dome evoke national achievement, but the city’s political present, in the veteran’s view, is marked by strikes, conflict, and the humiliation of those who fought.

That sense of betrayal is not confined to the former soldiers. The narrative describes a city divided between workers who suspect that interventionists profited from the war and former officers who return unemployed and feel despised by their former subordinates. The veteran’s own record complicates the accusations directed at him. He had volunteered for Baseggio’s “Death Squad,” fought at Monte Sant’Osvaldo and Monte Pertica, and continued fighting after being wounded. Baseggio praised him before General Grazioli, and he received a silver medal and a military cross. During leave, he travelled to Albania with a fellow soldier to search unsuccessfully for the grave of his brother Albert, a lieutenant in the Bersaglieri who had been killed in combat. In Florence, however, the man’s service does not shield him from being called a traitor.

Street conflict and political allegiance

The clash between wartime identity and postwar politics becomes immediate near Santa Maria del Fiore. A group of masons paving the piazza shout against capitalism and accuse the uniformed veteran of having supported an imperialist war. He is alone, injured, and on his way to seek help, but the insults provoke his anger. The encounter compresses Florence’s larger conflict into a brief street scene: the veteran sees himself as a patriot abandoned by politicians and civilians, while the workers identify him with a war fought for the powerful. Neither side recognizes the other’s claim to speak for the nation.

The city’s political tensions also surround the Fascists’ attempts to organize. On October 10, 1919, Amerigo Dumini and other former Arditi wait first at Santa Maria Novella station and then at Teatro Olimpia for Benito Mussolini, who has not arrived on the expected midnight train. Florence’s Fascist group remains small. Its first meeting, held at the end of April at the Association of Servicemen in Piazza Ottaviani, leaves its founders little influence; a reconstitution at the end of June draws only twenty-seven people, who appoint a three-member directorate. The October assembly is larger, with a few hundred people in a small room decorated with tricolor flags, Tuscan regimental banners, black pennants, and signs supporting the liberation of Fiume. Delegates from other parties have been invited but do not attend.

While the audience waits, Umberto Pasella, the movement’s secretary general, speaks. He draws attention to Carlo Delcroix, a blind war veteran who has lost both forearms and is watching from a balcony box with a military escort. Delcroix is lifted by his caregiver to receive the crowd’s applause and speaks of wounded veterans’ readiness to punish cowards. The moment turns physical disability and wartime sacrifice into a political spectacle: the assembly’s enthusiasm is directed not only toward an arriving leader but also toward a veteran presented as proof of the movement’s bond with ex-servicemen.

Mussolini’s arrival and the hostile streets

Benito Mussolini eventually enters Teatro Olimpia from the rear, followed by Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, Ferruccio Vecchi, and a tall young man in civilian clothes. The audience greets him with a chorus of acclaim, but his appearance is not that of a triumphant statesman: he is tired, unshaven, and dressed in a grease-stained white jumpsuit and a comical cycling cap. Inside the hall, the welcome briefly suggests that the local movement has found the figure it has been waiting for. Outside, the political mood is less accommodating.

After the meeting, Mussolini and his companions stop at Gambrinus as workers return from their jobs on tram number 15. Nearby cafés have already shuttered in anticipation of unrest, and police patrol the streets under the personal direction of the police chief. Revolver shots are fired; socialist workers jeer, and a scuffle follows in which chairs and blows are exchanged. An anarchist who had once admired Mussolini throws copper coins at his table, treating them as the price of betrayal. The Fascists close ranks around their leader and escort him to the Hotel Baglioni, with Leandro Arpinati watching his back. Further pursuit and fighting take place outside the hotel before the group manages to enter. The piazza is left strewn with rocks.

On October 11, Mussolini leaves Florence by car for Romagna. The departure is presented as an expulsion by the hostility of the very people he had hoped to win back. The contrast between the applause inside Teatro Olimpia and the rocks outside makes the limits of political acclaim clear: a packed meeting can stage unity, but it cannot by itself settle the movement’s conflict with the city’s workers.

A fragile organization and its methods

The later account of the Florentine Fascio in Montespertoli emphasizes how little institutional strength lay behind its ambitions. Amerigo Dumini arrives from Florence with Frullini and two other Fascists, while Gennaro Abbatemaggio, who has spent a week reconnoitering, has already coordinated with local Fascists. The local group is tiny: in a town of roughly ten thousand people, Florence’s Fascists can muster only four or five. Dumini names a platoon “La disperata” and asks Frullini, a house painter, to design a pennant featuring a skull, dagger, and labarum. Their headquarters on Via Cavour is a single room rented from a tailor, furnished with a table and two chairs. A portrait of Lenin lies on the floor, used as a spittoon; above it hangs a sign identifying the Italian Fascio di Combattimento and Student Vanguard.

The group’s poverty has practical consequences. Requests from Milan to organize squads for street confrontations have not been matched by funding for weapons, and Umberto Pasella returns a printing invoice rather than pay it. Earlier, the police chief had prohibited Dumini’s flyer criticizing socialists after the San Gervasio munitions-depot explosion, calling it monstrous. The group had also been largely absent from clashes around Santa Maria Novella, where deaths occurred on both sides, and from the factory occupations of September. Only after industrialists and agrarians feel useless in the face of workers running occupied factories does the account say that someone is found to pay for guns.

The Florentine Fascists then travel into the surrounding hill towns to remove socialist flags where socialist visibility has become too prominent. In Montespertoli, the red flag hangs motionless above the town hall, but the piazza is deserted and there are no socialist militants present. After supper at the home of the local Fascist Lino Cigheri, Dumini’s group enters the town bar in compact formation and proclaims its allegiance to Italy and Fiume. The expedition does not produce the confrontation its participants anticipate. As the group returns toward Florence, its account of the danger grows more dramatic, while Dumini falls silent. The episode exposes the distance between the movement’s martial self-image and the uncertain, sometimes farcical results of its local operations.

Florence therefore serves not simply as a backdrop but as a measure of Fascism’s uneven emergence. It is a place where the claims of veterans, workers, and political organizers compete in the same streets; where a small meeting can produce a leader’s ovation but a café encounter can turn hostile; and where a squad’s grand language outruns its numbers, resources, and reach. The city’s episodes connect private hardship and local antagonism to the book’s larger account of a postwar order in which political belonging is increasingly asserted through uniforms, crowds, and force.