Regio Esercito

Regio Esercito is presented as Italy’s formal military institution in a postwar crisis, not as a force that simply acts in concert with the Fascist movement. Its presence is most consequential in the contrast between state military capacity and the squads’ ambitions: the army’s soldiers and equipment help defend Rome, while Fascist leaders know that their own forces lack the training and arms for a real battle. At the same time, mutiny and retreat reveal a military institution caught in the wider disintegration of the postwar state.

The army after the war

The narrative places Regio Esercito in the shadow of the First World War and its immense human cost. Millions of soldiers return to a country transformed by mass death and political upheaval; the text describes five million veterans pressing back into the national landscape. This return makes demobilization more than an administrative matter: former soldiers become a large, politically unsettled population, and the competing movements seek to speak in their name. The army is therefore both an institution and the background to a society filled with people shaped by military service.

That distinction matters. Fascist organizers recruit among veterans and celebrate combatant credentials, but the veterans’ presence does not mean that the army itself has become Fascist. In the 1919 Milan candidacy, 18 of the 19 candidates had served at the front, including volunteers, wounded men, and disabled veterans. Its electoral symbol was a French-made grenade issued by the Italian army to the Arditi. The military object and the candidates’ service lent the list a combatant identity, but they were being used in a political campaign, not as evidence of the army’s institutional allegiance.

Mutiny and retreat

The army’s vulnerability becomes explicit in Ancona, where an entire regiment of Bersaglieri mutinies rather than accept deployment to reinforce the Italian garrison at Valona, which Albanian rebels threaten. The city’s working population supports the soldiers, and the barracks have to be fired upon to force them out. The episode is presented as a military crisis, not merely a local disturbance: disobedience within a regiment meets popular solidarity outside it, while the state resorts to force against its own troops.

Benito Mussolini responds to the episode in a letter to Gabriele D’Annunzio, describing Italy as undergoing a severe crisis of disintegration. The government’s subsequent decision to abandon its protectorate in Albania deepens that impression. The retreat means relinquishing one of the few gains left from the war, whose cost the narrative places at 600,000 Italian dead. Regio Esercito is not shown directing this political decision; rather, its soldiers and the military presence abroad become part of the national crisis from which the government withdraws.

A force the Fascists cannot yet become

By autumn 1922, the difference between Fascist squad violence and military capacity is a central strategic fact. Benito Mussolini summons Italo Balbo to Milan and hears that the squads are being militarized. Yet the narrative distinguishes the squads’ capacity to terrorize opponents and damage property from the discipline and battlefield competence of a real army. Regulations drafted by Emilio De Bono and Cesare De Vecchi impose ranks and hierarchy and remove elected commanders. These changes make the militia more centralized, but formal titles and discipline do not supply military training or adequate arms.

The weakness is concrete: the Paduan squads possess only a few thousand rifles, and nobody is training their members to use them. The Fascist leaders and the generals meeting with them understand the implication. If the regular army opens fire, the insurrection may collapse. Their plan to challenge the state is thus made under the shadow of an institution they cannot simply imitate or overcome by calling their armed followers an army.

The October 16 meeting on Via San Marco brings together Fascist commanders and senior military figures, among them Generals Fara and Ceccherini. Their presence demonstrates that some experienced officers participate in planning an armed insurrection; it does not erase the distinction between those participants and Regio Esercito as an institution. The meeting’s guarded setting, with royal guards outside and squad members inside, underscores that the plot is being organized against the state whose military resources remain a decisive obstacle.

The defense of Rome

On October 28, 1922, while a proclamation of a state of siege is posted in Rome, the forces assembled to defend the capital outmatch the Fascist columns in equipment and numbers. Under General Emanuele Pugliese, the defending division totals 28,000 men, including soldiers, Carabinieri, finance guards, and the Royal Guard of the Kingdom of Italy. It has 60 machine guns, 26 cannons, and 15 armored cars. The figures describe a composite force, not Regio Esercito alone, but place the regular military establishment within a powerful state defense.

The three Fascist columns that have reached their concentration areas number about 10,000. Many are inadequately armed, and the disruption of railway lines at Orte and Civitavecchia forces them to continue on foot. The episode makes the imbalance legible: the insurgents’ numbers and political momentum do not amount to comparable military equipment. The army’s importance lies partly in what the narrative says would happen if it intervened, and partly in the defensive strength the state can assemble around the capital.

Military authority and Fascist spectacle

Across these episodes, Regio Esercito functions as a measure of the distance between military reality and political performance. Fascists borrow combatant symbols, invoke veterans, reorganize their squads along military lines, and present their movement as a disciplined force. But the text repeatedly tests that image against the army’s actual scale, weaponry, and ability to defend the state. Fascist leaders can use violence against vulnerable opponents; that does not make their squads equivalent to trained troops.

The army’s position is nevertheless precarious. Mutiny, the withdrawal from Albania, and the country’s broader postwar fractures show that formal state power does not guarantee cohesion or political confidence. Yet the army remains a separate institution whose possible resistance shapes the Fascist calculation. Regio Esercito thus stands at the boundary between the old state’s surviving coercive capacity and the movement seeking to seize power: not a simple Fascist instrument, but neither an abstraction, since its loyalty, strength, and potential action determine the risks of insurrection.