Teatro Goldoni is the Livorno venue where the Italian Socialist Party’s seventeenth congress opens in January 1921. The book makes the theater more than a meeting place: its arrangement gives visible form to the party’s competing factions, while a confrontation over revolutionary violence turns political disagreement into a tense physical scene. The congress begins under the pressure of an ultimatum from the Communist International and ends this episode with Nicola Bombacci lowering a firearm without using it.

Setting and Political Stakes

The congress opens at two in the afternoon on January 15, in Livorno, described as a tourist destination known for its bathing establishments and thermal spas. Inside Teatro Goldoni, the delegates face a dispute whose stakes extend beyond procedure. A message from the Communist International, read by secretary Francesco Frola, attacks reformists and those unwilling to expel them. The question is whether the Italian party will accept Moscow’s conditions for remaining in the International, including changing the party’s name and renouncing comrades who reject revolution.

The debate unfolds against a striking mismatch between the party’s broad public strength and its internal discord. In the November elections, the Socialists had won control of 2,162 municipalities; the party had 156 parliamentarians and 216,000 members organized in 4,300 sections. Its newspaper Avanti! circulated more than 300,000 copies daily. Yet inside Teatro Goldoni, the congress is presented as a chamber of rival political positions, where the scale of the movement outside does not resolve the question of what it should become.

The Congress Made Visible

The seating plan gives the conflict a geography. Delegates of the Communist fraction, representing 58,000 electors, occupy the boxes on the left. The 100,000-strong centrist group sits in the orchestra, while the reformists, representing 15,000 votes, occupy the boxes on the right. The divisions are not merely described as an abstract disagreement: delegates are physically separated across the theater, and their positions make the balance of forces legible to the reader.

Nicola Bombacci listens from the left-side boxes. At the opening, the arrangement already carries a sense of a contest whose result may be settled before the proceedings are complete. The theater holds distinct blocs under one roof, but their shared presence does not mean shared purpose. As the congress continues, its factions contest not only policy but the authority to define loyalty, revolutionary commitment, and the boundaries of acceptable disagreement.

Debate and Escalation

On January 16, Christo Kabakciev, a Bulgarian delegate of the International, delivers an ultimatum: those who support the maximalists’ unitary motion will be expelled from the Communist International. Bombacci and the Communists applaud. Other sections answer with sarcastic cries, ridiculing the authority of the Moscow delegates. The exchange makes the theater a site where an external demand for discipline meets resistance from within the party.

The argument continues through January 17. Vincenzo Vacirca, a Sicilian trade unionist, first pleads the cause of southern farm laborers, drawing agreement across the factions. He then challenges Moscow’s directives in the name of freedom of thought and unity of action. In his account, communism and socialism are not separable causes for opponents of Sicily’s large landed estates; he blames the movement’s setbacks on those who preach violence in a way that invites repression. The intervention redirects attention from formulas and factional authority to the consequences of political rhetoric.

Vacirca’s mockery of Bombacci makes the disagreement personal. He recalls Bombacci’s earlier statement that he could not even use a penknife, then takes a small knife from his pocket and opens its blade. The audience turns toward Bombacci in the left boxes. The theater’s divided seating briefly gives way to a single focus: all eyes follow the exchange between the speaker on the floor and the Communist leader above.

The Weapon and the Venue’s Significance

Bombacci rises in anger and cries out that the weapon is not a penknife. He produces a revolver, but his hand wavers; the firearm is lowered, and he sinks back into the shadows of the box. No shot follows. The episode ends as a farce rather than a battle, but the threat has made the party’s internal conflict physically present in the room.

Teatro Goldoni’s importance in this episode comes from the way its layout and proceedings join political argument to staged action. The left, center, and right provide a concrete image of division; the exchange over the knife draws those divisions toward a common point of attention; and Bombacci’s lowered revolver leaves the threat unresolved rather than converting it into an attack. The narrator places the scene amid factional hatred, ideological rigidity, and personal rivalry, presenting the theater as a concentrated setting for a crisis in which formal disputes threaten the unity they claim to defend.