Bologna was both a Socialist-governed city and the center of a broad, politically red agricultural region. In its streets and civic buildings, postwar grievances became organized Fascist violence; the November 1920 bloodshed at Palazzo d’Accursio discredited the Socialist municipal government, while later mass parades and armed actions made Bologna a proving ground for the movement’s power. Its importance lay not only in the clashes themselves, but in how they furnished a local base, a public spectacle, and a story of revolutionary victory for Benito Mussolini and his followers.

A city in a red agricultural region

In autumn 1920, Bologna was shaken by the previous months’ devastation and by the defeat of the agrarians in a ten-month struggle over agricultural agreements. The peasants had triumphed, while agrarian employers faced the strength of a mass Socialist movement. In this setting, the city’s political streets filled with people who had not previously formed a single movement: demobilized officers without work, impoverished civil servants, shopkeepers, tenant farmers, contractors hostile to Socialist cooperatives and municipalized businesses, students, unemployed graduates, former revolutionary unionists, and young men who resented having missed the war. The narrative presents their arrival as a gathering of people who felt forgotten and were ready to act.

Leandro Arpinati became the local leader able to draw this disparate crowd into street action. He was a poor-born railway worker and former anarchist, a working-class man who found himself serving agrarian and industrial interests he despised. He had never been to war, but his established instinct for entering a brawl made him a natural leader of armed followers. Before committing to confrontation, he sent patrols through streets usually dominated by the workers’ movement, ordering them to sing Giovinezza. They returned without encountering opponents. Arpinati concluded that the Socialists would not make a revolution; meanwhile, frightened agrarians, unable to defend themselves, turned to him for a strategy of resistance.

From street clashes to Palazzo d’Accursio

Arpinati and his followers entered the conflict on September 20, 1920, outside the Salaborsa library. Their first major confrontation came when Socialists gathered on Via Indipendenza to mark the fiftieth anniversary of Italian Unification. Many people were injured and one later died. Fascist enrollment rose immediately. On October 10, the local fascio was re-established on Via Marsala, and Arpinati wrote to Milan in an atmosphere of growing confidence. Some Fascists objected to taking agrarian money; he ended the dispute by insisting that the moment demanded action rather than debate. Benito Mussolini, acting through Cesare Rossi, gave Arpinati full authority to continue the fighting.

The violence soon acquired a wider political setting. On October 14, anarchists associated with Ercole Bucco attacked the barracks on Via Cartoleria. An assailant, a royal guard brigadier, and a deputy police inspector died. The Fascists used the episode to their advantage: on October 16, their squads led the funeral procession. By November, conflict had become an anticipated confrontation between organized camps. The Socialist Union resolved to defend itself against Fascist violence with violence, saying it could not rely on the police. To mark its electoral victory, it planned a large demonstration for the inauguration of the new municipal council at Palazzo d’Accursio and assigned armed security duties to its red guards. On November 17, about four hundred members of the Bologna fascio met on Via Marsala and likewise resolved to be ready.

The civic center concentrated the danger. Palazzo d’Accursio, a crenellated seat of municipal power beside the Basilica of San Petronio and overlooking Piazza Maggiore, was to host the council’s inaugural session on November 21. In anticipation of trouble, the city’s police chief negotiated conditions with the Fascists: they would not attack while the great bell remained silent, and the red flag was not to be displayed until the end of the session, when the new mayor could show it as a party flag. Reinforcements were requested. On the morning of the ceremony, infantry, cavalry, carabinieri, and royal guards converged on the historic center; the piazza was barricaded, its entrances closed, and a cordon secured it. A couple of thousand Socialist delegates entered, while armed guards watched the building and armed red guards appeared on its balconies. Despite the precautions and the agreement, a red flag was raised from the Torre degli Asinelli at about 2:30 p.m.

The confrontation ended in deaths, arrests, and the collapse of the elected administration. Gunfire and detonations were heard from inside the council chamber; a Socialist militant shot and killed nationalist councillor Giulio Giordani, who had not been a Fascist in life but would be claimed as one after his death. The account reports ten dead and fifty wounded. It also preserves uncertainty about Arpinati’s role: some said they saw him urging the Fascists to attack beside the statue of Neptune; others claimed he ran into the palace courtyard with a gun. These remain rumors rather than established facts. The outcome, by contrast, was decisive: arrests and scandal overwhelmed the democratically elected council, which resigned en masse, and a commissioner appointed by the prefect took over the city. The massacre destroyed the credibility of the Socialist military organization and damaged the party’s standing.

A stage for Fascist power

Bologna’s political defeat became a setting for Fascist pageantry. On April 3, 1921, Arpinati organized a welcome for Benito Mussolini that brought about ten thousand Fascists to the station. The procession displayed the movement’s breadth and its capacity for discipline: squads marched in four battalions, accompanied by cyclists, motorcycle patrols, a student youth organization, a women’s group, and Fascist bands. Most participants wore black shirts or army uniforms. Mussolini and Arpinati, by contrast, appeared in civilian clothes. The cortege crossed the city to military music and passed Palazzo d’Accursio on the same day the prefect announced the dissolution of Bologna’s Socialist administration following the inquiry into the November massacre. Celebration and municipal dispossession thus occupied the same route.

The city also remained tied to the movement’s later national claims. After Mussolini became prime minister in October 1922, Arpinati led eight young Fascists in Bologna who freed dozens of comrades from San Giovanni in Monte prison and attacked carabinieri barracks and ammunition depots. All eight were killed. The book stresses the disjunction between the timing and the purpose of this action: Mussolini had already received the king’s telegram in Milan, and the attacks were no longer militarily useful. Their deaths nevertheless supplied an aura of heroism and violence around the new government. In a private account of the March on Rome, Mussolini described the national revolution as having caused thirty deaths, including eight in Bologna. The city’s earlier violence was folded into his presentation of Fascism as a revolution that had taken power while ordinary public and economic services continued.

A continuing political base

Bologna’s influence persisted through Arpinati’s role as a local power broker. In June 1924, while bedridden after a car accident, he assembled thousands of squadristi; three days later, fifty thousand blackshirts from across Emilia marched in the streets. The scale of that mobilization linked the city’s regional network to Mussolini’s effort to rally support for his government. Arpinati’s return to Rome at the end of July with four companions further showed how a figure formed in Bologna’s street politics remained connected to the national center. His direct question to Mussolini about responsibility for Giacomo Matteotti’s killing belongs to that later political crisis, but the encounter also underscores the continuing importance of Arpinati as both an ally and a witness from Bologna.

Across these episodes, Bologna changes from a Socialist municipal center into a place where Fascist organization can challenge, discredit, and outlast elected authority. The city’s arcades and piazza are not merely backdrops: they are the terrain on which patrols test the streets, rival armed groups prepare for confrontation, and mass processions make political power visible. Its story joins local agrarian conflict to national Fascist spectacle, with the unresolved violence of November 1920 still shadowing the triumphal parade of 1921 and the regime that followed.