Villa Borghese

Villa Borghese was the gathering place for Fascists before their October 31, 1922, procession through Rome. In the account of the movement’s passage into government, the park marks a transition: the marchers assembled there before filing through the capital in a display whose order and restraint presented power as both spectacle and control.

Assembly after the transfer of power

The procession took place as the government was being sworn in at the Quirinal Palace. On that morning, the Fascists gathered at Villa Borghese; at one o’clock in the afternoon, the cortege set out along the Lungotevere. The narrative therefore places the park at the hinge between the appointment of a new government and the public demonstration that followed.

From gathering to procession

At the Lungotevere, Benito Mussolini reviewed tens of thousands of marchers, many muddy and hungry, dressed in varied clothing and carrying daggers or clubs. They were then brought together in Piazza del Popolo, where strict order was enforced and violent action was prohibited. From there, they marched down Corso Umberto, past the Altare della Patria, and by the windows of the Quirinal Palace. The procession lasted six hours.

A threshold between threat and pageantry

The march’s discipline did not erase the violence surrounding the transfer of power. The account sets the procession against the deaths of eight young Fascists in Bologna, killed in attacks that had become militarily useless once the king’s decision was known. It describes the aura of heroism and violence as necessary to consecrate the new power. Villa Borghese, as the point where the marchers assembled, thus belongs to a sequence in which the threat of force was carried into the streets, while the procession itself was staged as an orderly public performance.