Venice

Venice is a recurring setting where political aspiration meets practical restraint. In September 1919 it stands between Benito Mussolini in Milan and Gabriele D’Annunzio’s seizure of Fiume: close enough to open onto the Adriatic, yet rendered as a maze in which Mussolini is watched and delayed. In spring 1921, the city becomes the destination of a fascist squad expedition against a workers’ district, joining its image of cultural distinction to the movement’s organized violence.

Setting and Routes

Venice enters the narrative through both its waterways and its intricate streets. On September 11, 1919, D’Annunzio left from the landing of the casetta rossa, a small palazzo on the Grand Canal where he had spent an extended period recovering from the plane crash that cost him an eye. A covered motorboat took him out into the lagoon; on the mainland, a red Fiat Tipo 4 awaited him. The departure connected Venice to the rebel venture across the water, with a Sardinian Grenadiers lieutenant and Guido Keller accompanying D’Annunzio toward Fiume.

The city also offers a view outward. From the Celestia landing, the lagoon opens toward San Michele cemetery, Murano, Burano, and Torcello; beyond them lie the Adriatic, Trieste, Fiume, and Dalmatia. This geography makes Venice a threshold in the account: a place from which the Adriatic campaign can be imagined as a route, even when the people considering it do not take it.

Mussolini and Sarfatti in September 1919

Mussolini spent several days in Venice from the evening of September 20, in the company of Margherita Sarfatti. Police followed the pair because officials feared that the director of Il Popolo d’Italia might join D’Annunzio, adding to the volunteers who were challenging the fragile embargo imposed on Fiume by the government of Francesco Saverio Nitti. Sarfatti treated the surveillance as an adventure and guided Mussolini through the city, but the agents continued to reappear along their route.

The contrast with D’Annunzio’s departure ten days earlier is central to the episode. Where the poet had crossed the open lagoon by launch, Mussolini encountered Venice as a confined network of streets and passages. The narrative traces the couple through calle, ramo, salizada, campo, and fondamenta before they reach Ponte delle Tette and turn into Calle de la Madonetta. The pursuit makes the city’s intricate plan more than scenery: it shapes the couple’s movements and gives the episode its sense of constraint.

The Decision Not to Go to Fiume

Venice is also where the account stages Mussolini’s consideration of what he is not going to do. In a chapel behind San Lorenzo, Sarfatti shows him a pink marble paving stone associated with popular devotion during an earlier plague. Mussolini touches it with his shoe. The scene connects his superstition and physical vulnerability to the questions confronting him: why not go to Fiume, support D’Annunzio, and commit the younger generation to the enterprise?

The reasons for staying are political as well as personal. Nitti’s government has weakened but remains in power; Mussolini fears leaving his limited forces without leadership in Milan. The army is divided, its senior command hostile to the rebels, while hundreds of thousands of steelworkers are striking against D’Annunzio. A march inland might open the way to communist revolution, and joining the poet would place Mussolini in a subordinate role. The account therefore sets the alluring possibility of a march on Rome against the patience and calculation required to reach power through existing political institutions. Venice marks the point from which that choice becomes legible: the route to Fiume is visible, but Mussolini does not take it.

Fascist Violence in Spring 1921

In spring 1921, Venice becomes the scene of a different kind of political incursion. Ferrara’s squads traveled there to storm the workers’ district of Castello. Photographs show them posing in front of the Basilica of San Marco, with their clubs partly concealed beneath bourgeois overcoats. The group’s excursion combined a public display in one of the city’s most recognizable settings with an impending attack; someone was killed before nightfall along Salizada San Francesco.

The account emphasizes the dissonance between the setting and the expedition. The city’s landmarks and the souvenir-photo format lend the outing an appearance of leisure, while the concealed clubs and fatal outcome disclose its violence. Italo Balbo, who appears smiling in the photographs, urged his men to use their clubs with calculated force. Venice thus becomes a destination where squad violence can be presented as a carefree excursion without ceasing to be a deliberate political assault.

A City Within the Movement’s Political Divisions

Venice also appears in the argument over whether fascism should become a conventional political party. When Mussolini proposed transforming the movement into a party in September 1921, Pietro Marsich, identified with Venice, joined the voices who denounced the proposal as a betrayal of the movement’s original spirit. His position places the city within a broader dispute over political form, even though the evidence does not describe a separate Venetian meeting or action.

That dispute sharpened after the pacification pact failed. A march of three thousand squadristi toward Ravenna, led by Balbo and Dino Grandi, displayed the force of a movement increasingly organized as an army. The book’s account contrasts the prospect of a party capable of containing squad violence with the reality of a uniformed, militarized force. Against this background, Venice’s appearances carry a double significance: it is an Adriatic passage associated with D’Annunzio’s rebellion, and a city whose streets and political factions are drawn into the expanding practice of fascist violence.