Estense Castle, in Ferrara, becomes more than a backdrop in the account of the city’s political upheaval: its water-filled moats, public role, and position at the center of a violent confrontation make it a focus of competing claims about who attacked whom. The deaths outside the Castle were followed by a struggle over blame and remembrance, as the balance of political power began to shift.

Setting and Civic Role

A prefect’s report notes that the moats around Estense Castle were still full of water. The observation takes on an ominous tone in the narrative, which remarks that unwelcome occupants had drowned there before; it does not identify a specific earlier incident. The Castle’s imposing presence thus enters the story first as a feature of Ferrara’s landscape, then as a place onto which present fears are projected.

During the December 1920 crisis, the Castle was also described as the seat of the socialist provincial government responsible for public administration. Its political significance was therefore not only architectural. It stood for an existing socialist authority at the moment when Fascists and their allies were contesting control of Ferrara and the surrounding province.

The Clashes Outside the Castle

Violence broke out on the sidelines of a rally called by Ferrara’s socialist mayor. A procession of nurses carrying a red flag was moving toward the rally when shots were fired in the direction of a counter-demonstration led by Leandro Arpinati and about fifty Fascists from Bologna. The report leaves uncertain who fired first. It adds that Bolsheviks may also have fired from the Castle’s battlements, where police recovered several grenades, and presents the attack on the blackshirts as possibly planned.

A later account stresses a different part of the sequence: it says the clash was caused by the aggression of the Bolognese Fascist squads, while the grenades—brought by socialists in preparation for defense—allowed the aggressors to shift responsibility. The competing versions make the Castle central to the dispute without settling the question of who initiated the gunfire. Its battlements became part of the public allegation; the grenades found there supplied a tangible object around which rival accounts could harden.

Deaths, Mourning, and Political Reversal

Three Fascists died in the clashes in front of the Castle. A month later, on December 22, 14,000 people attended their funeral in Ferrara. The scale of the turnout stood in sharp contrast to the electoral figures of the preceding year: the Socialist Party had won 43,000 votes in the province in November 1919, while anti-revolutionary parties together received fewer than 7,000 votes in the November 1920 local elections. The narrative treats the funeral as evidence that political strength was being remade through public action and commemoration, not merely measured at the ballot box.

The dead Fascists—Natalino Magnani, Giorgio Pagnoni, and Franco Gozzi—were honored as martyrs for liberty. Their courage was emphasized, including the small number of Fascist circles Gozzi had established in the province. By contrast, the death of Giovanni Mirella, a socialist nurse killed in the clashes, was not granted equivalent public recognition and was even attributed to the Popular Party. The contrast shows how the Castle’s violence entered an unequal politics of mourning: one side’s dead were commemorated, while the other’s loss was obscured or reassigned.

A Contested Landmark

The consequences reached beyond the site of the shooting. The government in Rome removed Ferrara’s prefect, and a reward of 20,000 lire was offered for information about the alleged murderers. Socialist leaders, including the mayor and figures associated with the Chamber of Labor, faced insults and threats; the local socialist newspaper La scintilla suspended publication. The Castle thus anchors a sequence in which an unresolved confrontation helped weaken the public position of local socialists.

Its narrative significance lies in this double role. Estense Castle is presented as a seat of socialist administration and as a fortified position implicated in reports of gunfire and grenades. The surrounding deaths then become material for rival political stories: the Castle’s physical details lend force to allegations, while the funeral and the uneven treatment of the dead show how those allegations could be converted into public legitimacy.