Rome

Rome is a political stage where competing claims to represent Italy take visible form: in the waiting crowd below the Campidoglio, in the charged rituals of Montecitorio, and in the Fascist movement’s efforts to occupy the city’s symbolic center. The city’s monuments and institutions do not merely frame events. They give political gestures a public scale, while exposing the distance between theatrical unity and the divided forces acting in its name.

The Campidoglio and the politics of national grievance

On May 6, 1919, tens of thousands gather in Piazza del Campidoglio, standing motionless beneath the equestrian statue of Marcus Aurelius and waiting for Gabriele D’Annunzio to appear on the city hall balcony. Many are young veterans of the Great War. D’Annunzio’s account of Italy’s victory as mutilated has made men who are physically uninjured feel deprived and defeated; the scene presents Rome as the place where that sense of grievance becomes a collective political identity. The crowd’s stillness and upward gaze turn the poet’s arrival into a ceremony of expectation.

D’Annunzio begins by recalling May 5 and its historical associations with Garibaldi and Napoleon. His speech moves through learned references, elaborate imagery, and solemn proclamations. The crowd may not follow every allusion, but it follows the performance’s rhythm. When he notices the flag, he traces and touches it; later, he presents it as an emblem of the dead and calls for it to be draped in black until Fiume and Dalmatia belong to Italy. In Rome, national mourning and territorial demand are joined in one public ritual. The address helps make humiliation and injustice feel widespread, while turning the balcony and the gathered crowd into a tableau of leader and people.

The city also figures in the political imagination of action. In 1919, Benito Mussolini and D’Annunzio meet in person for the first time after Mussolini has invited the poet to Milan. D’Annunzio denies rumors that they plotted to overthrow the government. Later, the prospect of marching on Rome appears as part of the poet’s extravagant vision of leading young men and soldiers, but the narrative contrasts that cavalry-like daring with the patience and street-level struggle it says politics actually requires. Rome is thus at once a destination of imagined seizure and a place whose political order must be approached through negotiation and performance.

Montecitorio and the socialist challenge

On December 1, 1919, the new parliament convenes at Montecitorio. The building’s monumental interior, including Aristide Sartorio’s vast allegorical frieze, presents an image of national history above the representatives assembled below. Yet the seating arrangement makes division immediately legible. Socialist deputies occupy the first three sections on the left, wearing red carnations; Giovanni Giolitti gives up his customary seat, while the left fills and the right fills more slowly.

When Vittorio Emanuele III arrives, senators and deputies rise and cheer, but the socialist bloc remains seated. At the invitation to sit, the deputies with red carnations stand and leave. Nicola Bombacci leads them past the throne, calling for a socialist republic. The king delivers his speech to a half-empty chamber. The walkout turns parliamentary protocol into a direct public refusal of royal authority, and the scene’s theatrical force briefly makes the departing deputies feel like representatives of a newly reborn people.

That exhilaration does not last. The deputies soon recognize that they have no plan for what to do next. Outside parliament, nationalist gangs begin attacking them, pulling at their republican bow ties and forcing them to proclaim loyalty to the king. The newly formed Royal Guard of Italy also appears in the violence; Giacinto Menotti Serrati is taken to security headquarters and beaten. The walkout therefore produces both a striking symbolic victory and immediate vulnerability. The account’s contrast is sharp: the socialists can empty the chamber of their presence, but they cannot thereby command the streets or determine what follows.

Mussolini in the parliamentary arena

Rome’s parliament later becomes the setting for Mussolini’s uneasy entry into formal politics. On June 21, 1921, he takes a seat on the last bench on the right, an isolated position from which he appears to observers below as a vulture on its perch. The placement reflects his estrangement from both sides: former socialist allies occupy the left, while the right is associated with the Giolitti allies he despises. He has chosen the extreme bench, but the chamber makes his isolation visible.

Mussolini regards parliament as gray and its proceedings as disordered chatter. He objects to the chamber’s vertical arrangement, where speakers address those below, and to the familiarity of colleagues who touch him or greet him as though he were already safely absorbed into respectable political life. The scene sets his suspicion of parliamentary conventions against the new attention paid to Fascism by bourgeois observers. Rome’s legislature offers him a platform, but it also exposes a tension between the movement’s street-based identity and the institutional setting into which its leader has entered.

Congress, commemoration, and political theater

In November 1921, the National Congress of the Fasci di Combattimento meets at the Auditorium Augusteo. Mussolini says he is prepared to step back and argues that responsibility should be distributed across the movement rather than resting on one man. After three hours of speaking, however, he remains the congress’s defining presence: the hall erupts in applause, singing, and cries of acclamation, and he is kissed, embraced, and showered with flowers. His announced withdrawal and the spectacle of personal devotion coexist in the same scene.

Five days before the congress, the Unknown Soldier has been buried in the most solemn ceremony yet held in unified Italy. Chosen by lot to represent the fallen, the unidentified body gives collective loss a single focus. After the congress, Fascists march toward Altare della Patria, where Mussolini and the party’s founders kneel for more than half an hour beside the marble tomb. Meanwhile, Fascist squad members from the north, outside their leaders’ command, provoke fights in popular districts. The contrast links the city’s competing forms of political action: disciplined commemoration at the national monument and uncontrolled violence in its streets. In this account, Rome’s ceremonies do not resolve political conflict. They show how movements seek authority by turning crowds, institutions, and memorial spaces into rival stages of belonging.