Christmas

Christmas in the book is more than a seasonal marker: it places domestic routine and religious observance beside a political crisis. On Christmas Eve 1920, Benito Mussolini carries Gabriele D’Annunzio’s desperate appeal in his jacket while declining to mobilize the Fascists for Fiume. Days later, the holiday’s family table appears in his own account as an unwelcome interruption to vigor. The contrast makes Christmas a measure of competing loyalties, not a pause from political time.

Christmas Eve and the appeal from Fiume

The episode begins in Milan on December 24, 1920, during the coldest days of the year. Fog has settled over the city, and frost gathers on parked cars. When Mussolini enters the Fascist headquarters, D’Annunzio’s letter is inside his jacket. The appeal had reached him that morning through Captain Balisti, who had traveled overnight from Fiume. With communications about to be cut, D’Annunzio had sent trusted men to seek support from his allies in Italy.

The letter asks the Fascists to honor their promise to rise up if the government launches a fratricidal attack on Fiume. Mussolini’s private response is dismissive: he calls D’Annunzio a great man but judges him irrational, adding that the Fascists already face the police and could be arrested at once. The practical risk is explicit. The letter does not produce the promised intervention; instead, its presence in Mussolini’s pocket marks the gap between an appeal for solidarity and his calculation of what the movement can safely do.

That calculation continues in public and behind closed doors. Mussolini’s newspaper supports recognition of the Regency of Carnaro as a way to end the dispute, while excluding annexation. In conversations with prefect Alfredo Lusignoli, however, he disavows D’Annunzio’s conduct and reassures the government that the Fascists will not act. At the central committee meeting on Christmas Eve, conciliatory language prevails, and Mussolini describes the Fiume question as secondary to Fascism’s future in domestic politics. He cannot openly abandon the opposing position without appearing a traitor to his followers, yet neither does he commit the movement to action.

The holiday beside the assault

The chronology sharpens the episode’s irony. On Christmas Eve, while the Milan committee meeting is already over and its members are hurrying home to celebrate, Italian regular troops begin their attack on Fiume at five in the afternoon. The city’s supporters receive no uprising from the Fascists. The last letter remains in Mussolini’s jacket as the military crisis it anticipated becomes reality.

The narration sets the political choice against the ordinary preparations of the feast. Fog thickens around the Duomo; dinner is already simmering. Many in Milan have come to regard D’Annunzio as a megalomaniac, and the committee’s restraint is wrapped in formulas of civic sense and moderation. The timing does not make the holiday the cause of inaction. Rather, the return to family celebration gives that inaction a concrete setting: a request for help is received, considered, and left unanswered while the city resumes its Christmas routines.

This juxtaposition also distinguishes D’Annunzio’s urgency from Mussolini’s priorities. Fiume’s crisis is immediate to the besieged, but for the Fascist leadership it is becoming an obstacle to political positioning at home. The holiday thus falls at a point when the movement’s rhetoric of shared struggle meets the limits of its willingness to incur risk.

The family table and Mussolini’s view of Christmas

In a passage dated December 31, 1920, Mussolini’s view of Christmas turns sharply against the domestic holiday. He regards time away from work, long meals, family conversation, and indulgent eating as forces that soften a man and diminish his vigor. The account gives this complaint a specific counterweight: the Mussolini family had spent more than three hours at Christmas dinner, where ten people ate a tray of baked pasta large enough for a regiment.

The scene is not simply an abstract rejection of family life. Rachele Mussolini had bought panettone at Cova and made a cake decorated with powdered sugar through a cardboard stencil, following a women’s magazine’s suggestion. Edda Mussolini recited a Christmas nursery rhyme, and Arnaldo Mussolini said a prayer of thanks. These details place food, domestic work, children’s performance, and religious observance within the holiday Mussolini criticizes. The contrast is revealing: the narrator records a household participating in familiar seasonal customs while its head complains that such customs sap him.

The two Christmas scenes show different forms of withdrawal. At the committee meeting, Mussolini distances Fascism from D’Annunzio’s crisis while preserving a public position that will not alienate his followers. In his later account of the family holiday, he presents domestic ease as a threat to personal discipline. Neither scene depicts a simple escape from politics: one shows political calculation continuing through a sacred holiday, the other shows his resistance to the comforts that the holiday gathers around the family.

Christmas within the book’s calendar of public ritual

Elsewhere, the narrative repeatedly sets political action within dated gatherings and rites. In Milan on April 15, 1919, a socialist procession converges with a smaller counter-demonstration, and the brief clash turns a public march into armed confrontation. A flare above the city serves as a starting signal for another charged assembly. On November 4, 1922, the Unknown Soldier’s burial gives national mourning a public, religious dimension: an unknown dead man represents the fallen collectively, and Fascist leaders kneel at his tomb. In August 1924, Giacomo Matteotti is buried again in Fratta, amid crowds demanding justice and vengeance.

These episodes are not Christmas scenes, but their position in the narrative illuminates the holiday’s significance. Political life is repeatedly staged through processions, ceremonies, crowds, and acts of remembrance, while Christmas brings the story into homes and family ritual. Against the public language of sacrifice and collective belonging, the December 1920 episode shows leaders deciding whether to risk action and then returning to private celebration. Christmas therefore marks neither a reconciliation nor a genuine suspension of conflict. It exposes how political commitments, religious custom, and domestic life occupy the same calendar without necessarily sharing the same obligations.