Civitavecchia serves two distinct roles in the account of the March on Rome: the disruption of its railway helps strand Fascist columns on foot, while the town later becomes one of the stops where Benito Mussolini’s train is halted by blackshirts. These appearances place the town at the junction of military obstruction and political spectacle.

Railway Disruption and the March

As the Fascist columns advanced toward the capital, Rome’s command ordered the railway lines at Orte and Civitavecchia disrupted. The resulting obstruction forced the men to continue on foot and scatter through woods and fields. Civitavecchia thus enters the march not as a stated assembly point, but as part of the effort to impede the movement of forces toward Rome.

That interruption forms part of a wider contrast in the march’s course. The three columns had reached their concentration areas, but the railway disruption and poor provisioning left many men moving through the countryside on foot, hungry, wet, and inadequately armed. Civitavecchia is one named point in a campaign whose intended conquest of power was accompanied by severe practical disarray.

Mussolini’s Delayed Journey

Civitavecchia reappears on October 30, 1922, during Mussolini’s journey to Rome after he had been summoned to form a government. Blackshirts planted themselves on the tracks there, as they had earlier at Fiorenzuola and Sarzana, delaying the train and prompting Mussolini to get out and review them. The train reached its destination more than an hour late.

The stop gave the new prime minister an opportunity to address the blackshirts, but it also exposed the tension between his demand for a perfectly timed departure and the movement’s capacity to interrupt his journey. After the halt at Civitavecchia, he continued toward Rome, arriving at 10:50 a.m.; at 11:05, he climbed the Quirinal’s stairs to receive the charge of governing the nation.

Narrative Significance

Civitavecchia’s two appearances are linked by the railway, but their political functions differ. In the earlier episode, the line’s disruption impedes the Fascist columns and contributes to their forced march; in the later one, blackshirts obstruct the train carrying the man about to become prime minister. The town’s brief place in the narrative therefore binds the march’s material confusion to the dramatic passage of power, without making either moment a straightforward display of centralized control.