The Ancona Uprising was a military mutiny in late June 1920 that drew support from the city’s working population and required force against the barracks to bring the insubordinate soldiers out. Its significance in the book lies in the convergence of army disobedience and popular unrest: the state’s military crisis appeared not as a problem confined to the ranks, but as one unfolding alongside mass political conflict.

Causes and Setting

The immediate cause was an order to send an entire regiment of Bersaglieri to reinforce the Italian garrison at Valona, which was threatened by Albanian rebels. The soldiers mutinied instead. The account gives no detailed explanation of their refusal, so the episode does not establish a specific motive beyond their resistance to the deployment.

The uprising occurred amid a broader postwar crisis. Elsewhere, in Bologna, labor disputes and socialist organizing had brought competing labor chambers, union demands, and pressure on employers into sharp conflict. In Emilia’s countryside, socialist leagues were expanding their influence over hiring and working conditions; farmhands averaged only 120 days of work a year, making seasonal employment and wages matters of survival. These developments are not presented as causes of the Ancona mutiny, but they place it within a period when political conflict reached into both military institutions and civilian life.

The Mutiny and Its Suppression

The working population of Ancona rose in support of the mutinous soldiers. The confrontation therefore joined the soldiers’ refusal to obey orders with a wider act of solidarity from the city’s workers. The authorities’ response reached the barracks: they had to be fired upon to get the soldiers out.

The account does not specify how many people were involved in the uprising beyond identifying an entire regiment, nor does it give casualty figures or describe the mutiny’s final settlement. What it does establish is the seriousness of the breakdown: an army unit assigned to an urgent military reinforcement refused its task, and restoring control required force against the place where the soldiers were barracked.

Political Meaning and Aftermath

Benito Mussolini was dejected by the episode. He wrote to Gabriele D’Annunzio complaining of the tremendous crisis of disintegration Italy was experiencing. His response makes the uprising more than a local disturbance in the book’s political narrative: it becomes a sign, for a prominent interventionist and nationalist, that the army and the country’s postwar order were coming apart.

The evidence does not describe a direct political consequence of the uprising or claim that it caused later developments. Its force is instead in the juxtaposition it creates: at a moment when the state needed soldiers for a threatened garrison, an entire regiment refused, while workers in the city backed them. The episode exposes the fragility of military authority within a society already divided by organized political and labor conflict.