Modena is one of the places where the book shows Italy’s postwar political contest turning into recurring street violence. Socialist electoral strength, fascist attacks on local institutions, the killing of a young fascist, and reprisals against labor organizations made the city part of a wider struggle over who could exercise power outside the formal state. The response of the authorities—at once hesitant and increasingly restrictive—did not remove the conflict; it altered the conditions under which it unfolded.

Provincial setting and political stakes

The conflict in Modena belonged to a front that the narrative places across the Po Valley. In the provincial elections, socialists won control of 59 of 68 municipalities, a result presented as a decisive expression of electoral support. The president of the provincial council opened its assembly by rejecting debate with political enemies and declaring an intention to defeat them. That stance mirrored the wider hardening of the political climate: electoral victory did not settle the question of authority, and both sides anticipated confrontation.

Modena also appears in the spread of fascist action beyond the largest urban centers. Fascists attacked municipal councilors there, while elsewhere in the region they targeted labor organizations, socialist town halls, and other institutions. The narrative describes these actions as part of a rapidly widening campaign, with violence extending from one locality to another along the Via Emilia and across the Po Valley. Modena’s significance lies in this connection between local clashes and a regional advance: it was not an isolated disturbance, but one point in an expanding conflict.

The killing of Mario Ruini and the funeral

On the night of January 22, the young fascist Mario Ruini was killed in Modena in an ambush attributed to three anarchists. His death became the immediate focus of a funeral that intensified rather than contained the conflict. During the clashes around the ceremony, involving blackshirts, communists, and the Royal Guard of the Kingdom of Italy, two more fascists were killed and Leandro Arpinati was wounded. Another account dates the funeral to January 24 and notes that two of the dead comrades were only 22 and 19 years old. The funeral thus brought political factions, state forces, and bereaved supporters into the same volatile setting.

The narrative presents the event not as a pause for mourning but as a turn in an ongoing chain of retaliation. On the evening of the funeral, the Chamber of Labor on Via del Carmine was set on fire in reprisal. The next day, Arpinati himself set fire to the Chamber of Labor in Bologna, as well as the Socialist Union’s headquarters and the newspaper La squilla. The sequence connects Modena’s violence to actions beyond the city, while showing how an individual killing could be used to justify attacks on the institutions of organized labor. The police, the account emphasizes, did not intervene in these retaliatory fires.

Raids, reprisals, and the limits of control

Modena also features in the continuing pattern of fascist attacks on socialist and labor institutions. In the narrative’s account of the winter’s violence, raids and clashes were accompanied by the burning of labor headquarters, while local fascist supporters celebrated the broader reversal of socialist influence. These actions belonged to a movement shifting from defensive postures to counterattack. Their targets were not only individuals in street confrontations but also the organizations and public spaces through which opponents exercised political power.

The government attempted to constrain this activity by sending Cesare Mori to Bologna as prefect, with the broader aim of disarming the fascists. Mori prohibited trucks from circulating in the provinces from Saturday afternoon until Sunday night, the period associated with raids. The measure did not stop expeditions. For an operation at Pieve di Cento, the trucks were left at farmsteads and the men assembled in open fields. Although this restriction concerned the wider provincial campaign rather than an operation in Modena itself, it clarifies the conditions surrounding the city’s unrest: raids continued despite official measures, with organizers adapting their logistics instead of abandoning their actions.

Modena in the wider conflict

The book’s references to Modena form a sequence rather than a single self-contained episode: a decisive socialist showing in the province, hardening rhetoric, attacks on municipal representatives, Ruini’s killing, deaths and injuries around the funeral, and fires directed at labor institutions. Each turn deepened the conflict between electoral legitimacy and organized force. The authorities’ failure to halt retaliatory violence, followed by restrictions that could be evaded, reveals the limits of state control in the face of armed political mobilization.

In this account, Modena helps make the geography of the postwar struggle concrete. The conflict was not confined to national speeches or parliamentary debate; it moved through provincial councils, streets, funerals, and labor buildings. The city’s recurring place in the narrative links political polarization to the practical means of coercion and reprisal, while its surrounding province shows how attempts at containment could be outpaced by the movement they sought to restrain.