Turin is one of the book’s recurring urban settings for the conflict between Fascist power and its opponents. It is presented not through a single defining episode but through a sequence: the December 1922 massacre, disputes over local Fascist candidacies, the weakness of militia mobilization during the 1924 political crisis, and the attack on Piero Gobetti. Together, these appearances make the city a measure of how political violence could be condemned, institutionalized, and then renewed.

December 1922: Violence and incorporation

The most extensive Turin episode begins with a street clash near the Barriera di Nizza tram station during the night of December 17–18, 1922. A communist tram driver killed two Fascists; the account notes that the confrontation apparently grew out of a personal dispute. Piero Brandimarte, the local squad leader, responded by assembling 3,000 Fascists from across the region. His slogan was that their dead should be avenged, and the assembled force proceeded to act on that principle.

From the afternoon of December 18 until the afternoon of December 20, Brandimarte’s squads carried out raids, seizures, arson, destruction, and killings. The two days and nights of violence brought mistaken identities and innocent victims as well as deliberate attacks. The account describes deaths in homes and streets, bodies recovered from surrounding areas, and the burning of the Chamber of Labor. The chamber had already been burned twice before; during this third fire, the squads celebrated against the glow of the flames. The attack on the labor institution made the violence more than a response to the deaths that had initiated it: it extended into the organized life of the workers’ movement.

Benito Mussolini publicly repudiated the massacre, calling it a discredit to humanity and threatening exemplary punishment. Yet within days, on December 23, he proclaimed an amnesty for politically motivated blood crimes committed for national ends. On December 28, he issued the first decree to the Council of Ministers for creating the Voluntary Militia for National Security. In the book’s account, this sequence exposes the tension in the government’s response: it denounced the uncontrolled violence while offering amnesty and drawing the men responsible for it into a state body. Turin thus becomes a concrete instance of a wider attempt to contain Fascist squad violence not by dismantling it, but by giving it an official form.

Local factionalism and electoral competition

Turin reappears in the internal contests of the National Fascist Party. As candidacies were organized, the local Fascist left supported Gioda, Ponti, and Torre, while the right opposed them. The disagreement was serious enough that the prefect repeatedly had to intervene to quell the quarrels. These disputes formed part of a broader struggle within the party: squads that had publicly scorned parliamentary honors now competed fiercely for the advantages of electoral nomination.

The episode complicates any picture of Fascism as a unified force. Its local actors had to be managed not only against political opponents but also against one another. In Turin, factional allegiance shaped who might appear on a list, while the prefect’s repeated interventions showed that these disagreements could not simply be settled by central direction. The contest over candidacies brought the party’s ambitions into the parliamentary arena, even as its militants had denounced that arena and its rewards.

The crisis of 1924

During the political crisis that followed Giacomo Matteotti’s disappearance, Turin again figures as a test of Fascist control. On June 15, orders were given to mobilize the militia, which was expected to defend the regime. The response varied sharply by city: 40 percent of those ordered to assemble in Rome appeared, 20 percent in Milan, and in Turin not a single man responded. That contrast turns a national mobilization order into a revealing local measure. The institution created after the 1922 violence could be presented as an arm of the state, but in this crisis its authority did not translate into participation in Turin.

The city’s political atmosphere also appears through the response of men implicated in the regime’s violence. When news reached Giuseppe Viola that Albino Volpi had been arrested in Milan, Viola, who was being sheltered by friends, said he would speak only with Mussolini if questioned and threatened to attack him. The remark belongs to the wider crisis rather than to a scene set in Turin, but it sharpens the contrast with the city’s missing militia: the regime faced both the failure of organized support and the volatility of people tied to its coercive networks.

The assault on Piero Gobetti

On September 5, 1924, Fascist squad members waited in a Turin street for Piero Gobetti, the young editor of La rivoluzione liberale, and beat him severely, leaving him with serious internal injuries. A small, wary crowd watched as one man faced a group of attackers. The book situates the assault within a wider resumption of demonstrations, destruction, and street incidents, and presents it as part of the violence gathering across the country after the regime had again been publicly discredited.

The attack gives Turin a different place in the sequence from its role in December 1922. The earlier episode showed squads acting on a large scale and the government subsequently seeking to incorporate their force into an official militia. The assault on Gobetti instead shows political violence directed at a prominent editor amid the 1924 crisis, while the attempt to mobilize the militia had recently failed in Turin. Read together, these episodes do not make the city a simple emblem of either Fascist control or resistance. They show its unsettled position: a place where organized violence could be exercised, redirected into state structures, and still reappear against an individual opponent.