Livorno is presented as a seaside destination for bathing and thermal spas, but in January 1921 it becomes the setting for a decisive rupture in Italian socialism. At the Teatro Goldoni, delegates debate whether to accept the Communist International’s demands and break with reformist comrades; at the Teatro San Marco, the communist secessionists establish the Italian Communist Party. The city’s importance lies in this sharp contrast between a crowded political congress and the violence beyond its walls, which the debates barely address.

The congress and its setting

The XVII Congress of the Italian Socialist Party opened at 2:00 p.m. on January 15, 1921, in Livorno’s Teatro Goldoni. Giovanni Bacci, the party’s interim president, began with a recollection of the Spartacist insurrection of 1919. Francesco Frola then read an address from the Communist International’s Executive Committee, attacking reformists and those who refused to expel them. The address turned an internal disagreement into an immediate test of party membership and allegiance.

The layout of the theater made the division visible. Delegates of the communist fraction, representing 58,000 electors, occupied the upper boxes on the left. The 100,000 voters represented by centrist delegates were grouped in the orchestra, while reformists representing 15,000 votes occupied the tiers on the right. This distribution gave the dispute a physical arrangement: separate factions occupied different parts of one auditorium even as they remained formally within the same party.

The congress met at a moment when Italian socialism was still a mass political force. The party had won majorities in 2,162 municipalities in the November elections, had 156 parliamentarians and counted 216,000 members across 4,300 sections. The daily circulation of Avanti! exceeded 300,000 copies. Yet the scale of this constituency did not prevent an acute crisis of direction. The narrative sets the party’s reach beyond the theater against the discord inside it, suggesting that organizational strength and political unity were not the same thing.

The dispute at the Teatro Goldoni

The demands confronting the delegates had been laid down by the Communist International at its previous July congress in 21 theses. To remain in the International, the Italian party was expected to change its name and renounce as counterrevolutionaries comrades who supported socialism but rejected revolution. The requirement left little room for compromise. In Italy, Nicola Bombacci and his followers still believed in revolutionary action after the failed factory occupations, while many of Giacinto Menotti Serrati’s maximalists, despite continuing to speak in revolutionary terms, no longer shared that conviction.

On January 16, the International’s delegate Christo Kabakciev delivered an ultimatum: those voting for the maximalists’ unitary motion would be expelled from the International. Bombacci and the communists applauded. Delegates elsewhere in the theater answered with sarcastic cries against the authority of Moscow’s representatives. The exchanges exposed more than a disagreement over procedure. They raised the question of whether a party could preserve its broad membership by refusing an external demand, or whether doing so would mean abandoning the revolutionary identity that the International required.

The debate continued amid arguments between reformists and revolutionaries, unitarians and secessionists. Vincenzo Vacirca first won agreement by pleading the cause of southern farm laborers, then challenged Moscow’s directives in the name of freedom of thought and unity of action. He argued that communism and socialism were not separate causes for those resisting large landed estates, and blamed hollow appeals to violence for inviting bourgeois repression. His intervention brought the dispute back from party formulas to the conditions and risks faced by workers and peasants.

The conflict briefly became a crisis inside the auditorium when Bombacci, stung by Vacirca’s reference to penknife revolutionaries, produced a revolver. Delegates near the stage ducked beneath their seats. Bombacci lowered the weapon and slumped in the shadows of a box; the moment ended without a shot. The episode turned a congress already divided by ideological hostility into a scene of near-violence, but it also ended in an anticlimax. The weapon did not resolve the dispute, and the factions remained locked in their political conflict.

The split and the Teatro San Marco

The decisive break came on January 21, when Amadeo Bordiga mounted the rostrum and ordered the communist delegates to leave the Teatro Goldoni. They walked out singing the socialist anthem and agreed to meet at the Teatro San Marco, a few hundred yards away. There, they founded the Italian Communist Party. The separation was therefore both an organizational act and a change of venue: one faction left the shared theater and began building a separate party elsewhere in the city.

The founding meeting took place under makeshift conditions. The Teatro San Marco had no seats or benches for the founders, and rain entered through wide openings in its damaged roof. They certified their party cards with the Hammer and sickle and remained standing for hours. The contrast with the Teatro Goldoni is pointed: the split that had been argued over in a formal congress was made tangible in a second theater where the founders stood together without ordinary furnishings. The new party’s creation was not presented as a settled triumph; it began amid division, discomfort and unresolved political stakes.

A congress beside a wider conflict

Livorno’s congress also intersects with Giacomo Matteotti’s departure for Ferrara. After listening to two days of debate, he left before speaking and travelled overnight by regional trains, changing at Florence and Bologna. He had been called to assume the leadership of Ferrara’s Chamber of Labor after its secretary and the mayor were arrested. His journey makes the congress’s limits especially visible: while delegates spent hours contesting socialist unity and Marxist orthodoxy, the discussion did not address what fascist squads were doing in Emilia and Romagna.

In Ferrara, Matteotti arrived at noon on January 18 and was soon surrounded by a hostile crowd. He refused a car and walked toward the Chamber of Labor under police protection; fascists assaulted him despite the escort. The events unfolding there form a stark counterpoint to the arguments in Livorno. The congress was debating the future of the workers’ movement while one of its deputies faced violence in a city where that movement was under pressure.

Livorno thus functions not merely as a place-name attached to a party congress but as the setting for the divergence of two political crises. Inside the theaters, socialists fought over revolution, unity and the authority of the Communist International. Outside the congress’s immediate frame, fascist violence was already shaping the conditions in which those choices had to be made. The founding of the Italian Communist Party gave the split an institutional outcome, while the congress’s silence about the squads emphasized how far ideological debate had become separated from the dangers confronting socialist organizers.