The Po Plain is portrayed as more than a setting for Italy’s postwar political conflict: its farms, villages, labor organizations, and routes of movement shape the balance between socialist workers and Fascist squads. Control of the countryside is built through competing systems of organization, then overturned through mobility and coercion; the region also becomes a stage for mass mobilization and the public performance of Fascist power.

A countryside organized by competing powers

The regional struggle takes place across communities where socialist influence is embedded in everyday life. In the countryside around Bologna, villages have farmers’ unions, community centers, cooperatives, and political cells. The leagues regulate labor conditions and impose rules on landowners; in the city, labor organizations also exert pressure, and access to bread can be made conditional on union membership. Employers and the middle classes face mounting pressure as the conflict reaches into both economic life and local politics.

In Emilia, socialist organizations hold 223 of 280 municipalities, while farmhands average only 120 working days a year. Their need for higher wages during the working season is bound to the risk of hunger during idle months. The leagues therefore extend their influence over hiring, work shifts, threshing, seed supplies, and planting. This is not simply a contest over political allegiance: it is a struggle over who can set the conditions under which rural labor and production operate.

The book emphasizes how deeply workers’ commitments are rooted in place. Community centers represent generations of sacrifice and are loved as social institutions, not treated by their members as disposable instruments of conflict. That attachment helps explain the disparity between workers defending established local gains and squads able to move rapidly from one target to another. The countryside’s existing networks give the leagues strength, but also make their communities vulnerable when the opposition can choose the time and place of attack.

The advantage of movement

Angelo Tasca explains the Fascist advantage in military terms: many squad members are former Arditi or soldiers led by officers, accustomed to movement and able to operate away from home. Workers, by contrast, are attached to the land on which they have won their gains through long struggles. The resulting imbalance favors an offensive force over a defensive one, sudden destruction over patient construction, and those with little to lose over people whose livelihoods and institutions are at stake.

That mobility is visible in the punitive expedition organized from Ferrara on January 23, 1921. Dozens of armed men set out in trucks supplied by the Agrarian Association, intending to strike several rural targets at once. Their planned attacks against the leagues in San Martino, Aguscello, Cona, Fossanova San Biagio, Denore, and Fossanova San Marco were organized around surprise and coordinated force. The expedition illustrates how transport and preparation could turn political violence into an operation against a network of rural institutions.

The collapse of socialist control in Rovigo province shows the effects of this pressure. Its 63 municipalities had been in socialist hands, yet they were occupied one after another during a single winter, without a coordinated defense. At meetings, squads could beat local leaders and induce peasants to join the Fascist organization. In some places, socialist members surrendered their flags and publicly trampled them; elsewhere, the change in allegiance followed an assault on a leader in front of the assembly. The speed of this reversal made the loss of power appear both collective and difficult to resist.

From rural organization to mass mobilization

By 1921, the shift is visible on a wider scale. Across northern Italy, 80 percent of socialist and Catholic organizations had been dissolved or placed under prefectural administration after squad raids; some socialist mayors resigned under intimidation. In Ferrara province, rural populations moved from the red leagues into Fascist unions, and some former league leaders publicly trampled their flags. The narrative describes hundreds of thousands of socialist farm laborers becoming Fascists within a year, presenting the change as a mass transfer of organizational allegiance rather than a simple replacement of one set of leaders by another.

The region’s channels and roads also serve a different kind of politics in May 1922. At midnight on May 11, thousands of impoverished farmworkers began moving toward Ferrara from remote farmhouses, traveling on foot, by bicycle, in wagons, and on barges pulled along the canals by horses or people. By morning, 50,000 farm laborers had entered the city. The planned mobilization brought rural deprivation into an urban center and converted the region’s dispersed population into a concentrated political force.

Italo Balbo’s preparations were designed to keep the occupation under Fascist control. He ordered provincial leaders to mobilize, prohibited beatings and alcohol, and arranged for schools to be used as billets. Once the marchers reached Ferrara, telephone lines were cut, shops and businesses closed, and the castle was surrounded. The prefect, alarmed by the occupation, asked to meet the commander. The episode makes the countryside’s people and routes visible as political resources: the same movement that had enabled squads to raid rural organizations could now carry a mass of unemployed workers into a city.

A landscape of political transformation

The Po Plain’s importance lies in the way its material and social geography organizes political power. Workers’ ties to land and community institutions sustain durable local organization; the squads’ ability to move, assemble forces, and strike multiple sites gives them a different tactical advantage. Later, mass movement along rural routes serves a further purpose, concentrating people in Ferrara to make their hardship impossible for the authorities to ignore. The region is therefore shown not as a passive backdrop but as terrain through which rival movements organize, attack, retreat, and gather support.

That transformation also feeds a larger Fascist story of national rebirth. In a military-style march from Romagna toward Ravenna, Italo Balbo and Dino Grandi assembled 3,000 squad members in columns; for the first time, all were made to wear the black shirt as a uniform. The display suggested the emergence of a Fascist army and sharpened the choice between forming a political party and consolidating an armed movement. The rural conflicts of the Po Plain thus connect local control and organized violence to a broader project: turning fragmented political forces into a disciplined national power.