Royal Italian Grenadiers

The Carabinieri are presented as a force of the state whose role in the book turns on moments when public order becomes a test of political authority. At Milan, they form a cordon between opposing processions; at Sarzana, a small platoon confronts a much larger fascist force. The contrast is decisive: the squads’ apparent dominance over vulnerable opponents does not guarantee victory when they face organized state resistance.

Position between rival crowds

During the Milan confrontation of April 15, 1919, a cordon of Carabinieri blocks the outlet from Via dei Mercanti, placing the force physically between a socialist procession and a smaller counter-demonstration of officers, Arditi, and Futurists. The arrangement holds the two groups apart only briefly. Once the cordon opens, uniformed officers and Arditi advance in small groups, and the clash lasts about a minute. The Carabinieri are not described as the principal attackers; their cordon instead marks the boundary whose opening allows the confrontation to become armed violence.

That staging matters to the organization’s narrative role. The cordon makes state authority visible as a barrier between rival crowds, but it does not settle the conflict or keep the procession intact. The scene presents the state’s presence as consequential yet precarious: a line of officers can temporarily separate opposing forces, but the line itself may open, and political violence can move through the space it had contained.

The confrontation at Sarzana

The clearest test comes at Sarzana, when roughly five hundred fascists arrive seeking the release of Renato Ricci and retaliation against communists. At the end of the avenue, about fifteen Carabinieri stand in a single line. Their machine guns have been left unguarded in vans behind them. The fascists initially greet the Carabinieri and the army as allies, reflecting the squads’ expectation that state forces will remain accommodating, as they had on earlier punitive raids.

That expectation fails when Amerigo Dùmini approaches to negotiate. Two Carabinieri meet him, one in civilian clothes and one in uniform, and the captain refuses the terms he demands. The account makes the exchange a turn in the encounter: a force accustomed to acting with the authorities’ complicity now faces officers who reject its demands. The numbers remain starkly unequal, but the Carabinieri do not yield the ground.

As the fascists advance, the Carabinieri are ordered to kneel and prepare their bayonets and firearms. A shot is fired; a Carabiniere falls, and the others fire into the tightly grouped front of the advancing column. After a brief exchange, the fascist leaders and Captain Jurgens stop the firing and return to negotiations. The account does not give the first shot a named source. It emphasizes instead how quickly the encounter changes once armed men face trained resistance.

The fascists withdraw in confusion, scattering across the countryside. The book then describes peasants capturing and killing some of the fleeing men; this aftermath makes Sarzana more than a direct contest between a platoon and a squad expedition. The Carabinieri’s resistance disrupts the fascists’ advance, while the breakdown of their column leaves them exposed to the rural opponents they had come to punish.

What Sarzana demonstrates

The episode is later treated as a political lesson. Sarzana shows, in the narrator’s account, that the police have begun to follow a new principle, and that the squads’ ferocity can disappear when they meet a trained force with weapons ready. The comparison—five hundred routed by fifteen—reverses the arithmetic on which the expedition’s confidence depends. Numbers, equipment, and the assumption of official indulgence have not secured control.

This reading also clarifies the difference between violence against disorganized, unarmed opponents and a confrontation with state personnel prepared to resist. The Carabinieri do not appear as a universal solution to political disorder: the Milan cordon opens, and at Sarzana the encounter produces further violence rather than a settled peace. But their refusal to accept Dùmini’s terms exposes the fragility of the squads’ customary advantage. In this account, their significance lies less in a broad institutional portrait than in the boundary they represent: the point at which tolerated or unchecked squad action meets an armed assertion of state authority.

Scope of the portrayal

The evidence gives no sustained account of the Carabinieri’s internal organization, recruitment, or ordinary duties. It instead places them in sharply defined public scenes: holding a cordon in Milan and confronting an armed expedition at Sarzana. Their importance is therefore relational. The book measures them against crowds, fascist squads, and the state’s contested capacity to enforce its authority, showing how the same force can appear first as a divider of opposing groups and then as an obstacle the squads cannot simply push aside.