Florence is portrayed as a city where political conflict repeatedly became a struggle over streets, workplaces, and public authority. In February and March 1921, the killing of railway-union leader Spartaco Lavagnini was followed by a divided city, a broad stoppage of essential services, and armed repression in the working-class districts. The city also supplied personnel and organizing networks to fascist action beyond its boundaries, linking its local violence to the movement’s national advance and later political crimes.

A city on the brink

On February 27, 1921, an explosion near Palazzo Antinori set off a rapid mobilization of fascists. Reports blamed the political left, but accounts disagreed about who had carried out the bombing: some named Bolsheviks, others anarchists, and others offered different descriptions of a supposed suspect. The uncertainty did not slow the response. Word spread that an assembly would take place at 3 p.m. at the fascist headquarters on Via Ottaviani, and the men were called to arms. The Liberal Party, supported by nationalists and fascists, was inaugurating a student-group pennant; a patriotic procession had reached San Gaetano when the bomb went off.

That evening, a squad of about thirty men marched through the streets in military formation. On Via dei Ginori, the fascists encountered a funeral procession, moved aside, and saluted on command, while frightened passersby could see that the men carried revolvers. The march continued along Via Taddea to the railway workers’ union headquarters. Most of the squad remained outside to watch the street; three men went upstairs. In an office, they found Spartaco Lavagnini at his desk, working on a draft. He was the union’s secretary and editor of the newspaper Azione comunista, and was regarded as a figure from whom Tuscan communists expected a revolution. He was unarmed and working when he was killed.

Barricades and military repression

Lavagnini’s murder split Florence. By dawn, working-class communities had barricaded the districts and outskirts on the left bank of the Arno, from San Frediano to Scandicci. Across the river, the army was deployed amid fears of an uprising. Four 65-millimeter cannons in Piazza Vittorio covered the streets, and police blocked the bridges. The city’s division was physical as well as political: people feared attack in the barricaded neighborhoods, while troops prepared to enter them.

The railway workers stopped trains at Rifredi, Campo di Marte, and San Donnino after news of the killing spread. Tram conductors joined them, followed by electricians and workers from other trades. Water, gas, and electricity were cut off; trains and trams ceased running, and shops closed. Florence’s ordinary systems of movement and supply became part of the confrontation, extending the effects of the murder far beyond the union office.

Fascists came into the streets around noon, after spending the night at their headquarters. Their attempted advance into San Frediano was resisted. In Piazza Tasso, Amerigo Dumini and his men were met with stones, roof tiles, plaster, masonry, and even a stone sink thrown from above; gunfire came from windows, and the attackers took cover before an armored police vehicle helped them escape. The failed raid was followed by a request for army intervention. Infantry units and Bersaglieri entered the Oltrarno from the Santa Trinita and Carraia bridges, using armored cars to force the barricades and then attacking resistance house by house. Fascists followed the troops and police into the neighborhoods, where they carried out reprisals against their opponents’ associations.

The fighting continued on March 1. At Ponte a Ema, the defense was broken only after the use of 75-millimeter field guns; at Santa Croce, combat lasted five hours. By evening, the troops returned to the city in triumph, displaying captured red flags and a portrait of Lenin. The account then records a transfer of arms and explosives from the Army Corps to the fascists: 120 muskets and three crates of SIPE grenades. At the Chamber of Labor hall on Via Tintori, a fascist set fire to benches, registers, and red flags. Florence’s crisis thus ended not with a return to neutral civic order, but with the destruction of labor institutions and the strengthening of the forces that had attacked them.

A local force in a national campaign

Florence’s importance in the later account is not confined to its own streets. During the crisis surrounding the March on Rome, Tuscan fascist squads acted ahead of schedule. In Florence, men under Tullio Tamburini arrested officials and besieged the prefecture while a banquet was being held for General Armando Diaz. The episode alarmed Italo Balbo: an attack affecting Diaz, a celebrated general, risked turning the army against the fascists. Balbo drove through the night to Florence and said he had managed to stop the action in time and pay his respects to the general. His intervention shows the strain between local squad leaders, whose assaults could jeopardize the movement’s national strategy, and leaders trying to secure power without provoking a military defeat.

Florence also appears as a source of personnel for a later operation organized beyond the city. When Cesare Rossi found Amerigo Dumini in Perugia and ordered him to travel to Milan to coordinate an assignment, Dumini contacted Pirro Nenciolini, a Florentine comrade from earlier punitive expeditions. Nenciolini gathered trusted men and took the train; Milan-based fascists were mobilized as well. The account presents the Florentine contingent as an intentional part of a wider network, not an accidental gathering: Rossi doubted that the younger Lombard fascists could carry out the task on their own. The city’s earlier squad violence had helped establish connections that could be activated elsewhere.

The city in the narrative of fascist violence

The Florence episodes return the account to a recurring contrast: fascist leaders sought to present themselves as agents of order, while their ascent relied on armed groups whose actions could bring cities to a standstill or place the government and army under pressure. In 1921, the city’s split, the halted trains, and the barricaded districts made that conflict visible at street level. In 1922, the premature action against the prefecture demonstrated how local violence could threaten the movement’s broader political calculations. Florence is therefore both a setting of direct confrontation and a node in a national system of mobilization.

The account later refers to violent events in Florence as part of a maneuver intended to reassure fascist extremists, alongside a decree prohibiting newspaper publication on January 1, 1925. It supplies no further details of those events, but the reference gives the city a final, pointed place in the narrative: Florence’s record of political violence remained available to the regime as a means of managing its own militants, even when the account treats the regime’s position as increasingly precarious.