Perugia is both a local base of Fascist organization and, during the March on Rome, the headquarters of a command unable to maintain reliable contact with the forces it was supposed to direct. The contrast is decisive: a city chosen as the nerve center of an attempted seizure of power becomes a place of isolation, where unfamiliar maps and a silent telephone expose the fragility of the operation.

A local Fascist base

Perugia’s place in the narrative begins before the march. Alfredo Misuri founded its Fascist organization in January 1921 and became a squad leader in Umbria. His subsequent political course reflected the movement’s shifting alliances: before the march, a rivalry with another Perugian squad leader led him to join the nationalists; after the nationalists merged with the National Fascist Party, he found himself a Fascist again, despite his earlier departure from the organization.

That return did not mean reconciliation. Four days after the merger, the party’s executive council expelled Misuri for his past dissidence. Still personally devoted to Benito Mussolini, he warned the leader that he intended to speak in Parliament in opposition to Fascism. Mussolini threatened arrest, while Misuri answered by invoking constitutional liberties. His story connects Perugia’s local political beginnings to the widening conflict over whether the movement would tolerate dissent once it held power.

The Quadrumvirate’s headquarters

During the March on Rome, Perugia became the headquarters of the Quadrumvirate. On the evening of October 27, Michele Bianchi and Emilio De Bono had spent hours studying maps of territory they did not know. The city was poorly suited to command: it stood away from the main railway lines, its regional connections were few and circuitous, and mud further impeded travel. Telephone and telegraph communications were nearly nonexistent, leaving the commanders with little information about events elsewhere.

One proposed remedy was to move the headquarters to Orte, a railway hub near the places designated for troop concentrations, including Monterotondo, Santa Marinella, and Tivoli. The plan could not proceed because the commanders could not reach Mussolini, still in Milan, to obtain permission. The silence of the telephone thus became more than an inconvenience: it prevented the men charged with directing the march from changing their position, even as they recognized that their position was unsuitable.

The command’s local surroundings sharpened this contradiction. Its forces included several local centuries and squads named Satana, Toti, Fiume, Grifo, and Disperatissima. The last name, meaning extremely desperate, seemed to fit the predicament. Perugia was not simply distant from the action; its communications failures made distance a practical loss of command.

The march seen from the command room

By the morning of October 28, the headquarters bore the marks of an unsteady operation. Cesare Maria De Vecchi arrived with Dino Grandi after an eight-hour journey through mud. In the command room, squad members were still asleep after a night of revelry, while the operations map hung against the wall by a single tack. The scene places the military language of a revolution beside the improvised conditions of its leadership: the map promised coordination, but the commanders’ isolation had already undermined it.

Perugia’s importance in this episode therefore lies less in any decisive action undertaken within the city than in the mismatch between its assigned role and its capabilities. The Quadrumvirate was expected to direct troop movements from a headquarters cut off from the principal routes and from reliable news. Its inability to contact Mussolini left the command unable to put even its proposed relocation into effect. The city’s isolation made the march’s organizational weakness visible at the center of its supposed command structure.

A point in a wider network

Perugia also appears as a source of personnel and a waypoint in the movement’s operations beyond Umbria. When Fascist dissidents in Ferrara challenged the local leadership, Balbo arranged for six trusted members of Perugia’s militia to be sent there. Their mission formed part of an effort to suppress internal opposition and restore the authority of the Ferrara organization. In this instance, Perugia’s squads were not merely local forces: they could be dispatched into another city as instruments of party discipline.

The city briefly served a different, more personal function in the Matteotti affair. Amerigo Dumini was in Perugia, where he had taken refuge with a woman, when Cesare Rossi tracked him down and ordered him to go to Milan to coordinate an operation. Dumini contacted an associate in Florence, gathered trusted comrades, and took the first train. Perugia was thus a temporary waypoint in the movement of operatives, as well as a base for the militia and the failed command center of the march.

Across these episodes, Perugia links local recruitment, factional enforcement, and national political crisis. Its poor communications during the march make it an especially telling setting: the city is charged with directing a national movement at the very moment its commanders cannot reliably communicate with one another or with their leader.