Italy is more than the setting for the book’s political struggles: it is their contested terrain, divided between a crisis-ridden liberal state, organized socialist and peasant movements, and a rapidly expanding fascist movement. The country’s geography gives those conflicts different forms, from labor disputes in Bologna and the farming districts of Emilia to the Adriatic question and the political struggles centered in Rome. The arc is not a simple passage from disorder to stability. It shows how institutions continued to operate even as their ability to control armed organizations, sustain political competition, and command public allegiance diminished.

A country in the postwar crisis

The opening vision of Italy’s European setting is one of exhausted authority. The old political class appears overwhelmed by a mass of five million returning soldiers, while the forecast promises no quick relief from hardship or conflict. The image of veterans pressing against territorial borders makes the postwar crisis both social and political: the country must find a place for those who have returned from war, while established leaders seem unable to direct what comes next. This atmosphere makes national renewal compelling, but also leaves open who will define it and by what means.

The strains were not confined to the capital. In Bologna, political and economic pressure gathered around rival labor organizations and disputes over property and access to work. A socialist mayor, described as moderate in his own inclinations, was drawn into calls for tenants to occupy elegant homes and declare themselves owners. Union membership could determine access to bread, employers faced such uncertainty that some preferred to sell their businesses, and the middle classes were squeezed between competing forces. These details make the city’s crisis material as well as ideological: control of housing, employment, and food helped determine who could participate in ordinary life.

The countryside of Emilia presented another concentration of power. Socialists controlled 223 of the region’s 280 municipalities, while peasant leagues organized hiring through their own placement office. Farmhands averaged only 120 working days a year, making wages a question of survival during the months without work. The leagues’ influence extended beyond employment to work shifts, threshing-machine operations, seed supplies, and crops. A struggle that landowners could experience as a question of profit was, for laborers, a question of whether they could live through the idle season. The growing reach of the leagues therefore made local economic administration a direct political contest.

Local organization and political violence

The response to this rural organization was also organized. On January 23, a punitive expedition left Ferrara for nearby villages, including San Martino, Aguscello, Cona, Fossanova San Biagio, Denore, and Fossanova San Marco. The force consisted of dozens of armed men, arranged to strike several targets at once. Trucks supplied by the Agrarian Association enabled them to move between those targets, while surprise and coordinated action were treated as essential to the operation. The account presents violence not as an accidental eruption but as a method supported by local resources and planned against an existing network of peasant leagues.

The mobilization of impoverished bands from the Ferrarese countryside likewise demonstrates the importance of organization and transport. Beginning at midnight on May 11, thousands headed toward the city from scattered farmhouses. They travelled on foot, by bicycle, in wagons, and on barges pulled by horses or by people along the banks of the Po of Goro and Po of Volano. Their movement connected distant rural settlements to the city through a shared political undertaking. In this landscape, roads and waterways were not incidental scenery: they were routes along which people and force could be assembled.

By the summer of 1922, the Labor Alliance made a final attempt at resistance through a general strike beginning at midnight on July 31. Calling it a legalitarian strike, it framed the action as a joint defense of political and union liberties by workers’ and peasants’ organizations. The declaration came after news of Italo Balbo’s column of fire, and the strike was presented as a last, all-or-nothing stand. Its framing reveals the stakes of the conflict: the defense of everyday political freedoms had become bound to the capacity of a nationwide coalition to act together.

Fiume and the Adriatic frontier

The Adriatic dispute made the limits of Italy’s postwar ambitions visible on the map. Under the Treaty of Rapallo, announced on November 12, Italy’s eastern border was shifted to Monte Nevoso, leaving Trieste within Italy, while Dalmatia was relinquished apart from Zadar. Zadar remained an Italian possession without the surrounding hinterland or adjacent islands. Fiume, meanwhile, was accorded full independence, and Sussak, including Port Baross, went to Croatia. The result was a settlement in which Fiume was neither Italian nor Croatian and was cut off from maritime trade with the East.

For Gabriele D’Annunzio and his legionnaires, Fiume represented a rival account of the year and of Italy’s future. In his address, he contrasted the city’s youth, beauty, life, and promise with the negotiations at Versailles, which he associated with a faltering and fearful Europe. His language turned a border settlement into a choice between exhausted diplomacy and a heroic national future. The agreement at Rapallo therefore struck not only at a territorial claim but also at the political theatre built around Fiume as a symbol of renewal.

Yet the account also presents a countercurrent to the demand for further conflict: Italy needed peace to recover and rebuild, and a new war was rejected unless sudden aggression made it unavoidable. Against this position, an order called for an immediate advance along the front, overcoming anyone who impeded the soldiers, entering Fiume quickly, and continuing until the city was occupied. The opposing imperatives—reconstruction through peace and national honor through seizure—show how the Adriatic frontier condensed broader disagreements over what recovery required.

The state and the transfer of power

The crisis of authority became explicit in arguments made by fascist leaders. At a meeting described in the account, Benito Mussolini claimed that a state unable to defend itself had no right to exist. He pointed to the contradiction of an armed organization with officers and regulations operating in a country that supposedly possessed an army and police, then used that contradiction to argue that fascists had to come to power. This was an assertion of political necessity, but it also exposed the danger: rather than restoring the state’s control over force, the argument treated its weakness as grounds for an armed party to take power.

Events in Rome during the attempted insurrection brought that weakness into sharp relief. The proclamation of a state of siege intended to crush the uprising was being posted in the capital while the revolt had already failed in the Lazio countryside. The gap between the official response and the course of events made the state’s actions appear belated. On October 30, 1922, Mussolini climbed the stairs of the Quirinal Palace to receive the king’s charge to govern. At thirty-nine, with no government or public-administration experience and only sixteen months in the Chamber of Deputies, he became Italy’s youngest prime minister. He wore the black shirt of an armed party, making the transfer of office a scene in which constitutional appointment and paramilitary identity stood together.

The parliamentary landscape had also been altered by the organization of Catholic political life. The founding of Luigi Sturzo’s party in 1919 brought Catholics into elections after a long prohibition on political participation. Its 110 deputies, elected across the country, became crucial to the formation of governing coalitions and to the resolution of parliamentary crises. Italy’s political balance therefore depended not only on the conflict between socialists and fascists, but also on a Catholic party capable of tipping the parliamentary scales.

Elections, public crisis, and the unsettled new era

The national list of the Fascio Littorio won 4.65 million votes, or 64.9 percent of the yes votes, in the election described as triumphant. The Acerbo law had promised an outsized majority to a list receiving more than 25 percent, but the fascist list exceeded that threshold by a wide margin. All 356 of its candidates were elected, and 19 representatives from a second national list joined them, giving Mussolini’s government 374 representatives in Parliament. The outcome provided a vast parliamentary majority, but it sat within a political environment already shaped by intimidation and organized violence.

On May 24, the new Parliament convened on the ninth anniversary of Italy’s entry into the Great War, a date chosen to signal the beginning of a fascist era. The inauguration did not make that new era secure: it was described as struggling to begin. That contrast matters. A calendar could announce political transformation, and an election could produce an imposing majority, while the underlying conflict remained unresolved.

The later abduction of a parliamentarian in broad daylight shattered ordinary routines and provoked widespread demands for justice. Opposition newspapers issued repeated special editions, and protest extended even into fascist ranks. The apparent crime made political corruption, violence against rivals, and the erosion of ideals suddenly intolerable to many. Yet outrage did not become sustained collective resistance. By dinner time, the demands of everyday life had prevailed; public attention narrowed into avid following of reports, while the nation’s sense of justice remained clouded and listless. Italy thus ends this arc in mourning, aligned with a mother’s sorrow, as the abduction accelerates the political crisis without immediately resolving the struggle over the country’s future.