Ravenna is a recurring setting in the book’s account of fascist mobilization: first as the destination of a conspicuous march that made the black-shirted squads appear as an army, and later as the focus of a campaign of burning and intimidation. The contrast gives the city a particular significance. It is where political display and organized violence converge, while events there repeatedly disrupt negotiations taking place in Rome.

The 1921 March

On September 12, 1921, three thousand fascist squads assembled for a march from Romagna to Ravenna. The date joined two commemorations: the sixth centenary of Dante’s death and the second anniversary of the occupation of Fiume. The march also followed the defeat of efforts to secure a pacification pact. Its scale and military formation made it more than a local procession: the narrative presents it as a demonstration that the squads could act collectively as a force.

For the first time, Italo Balbo managed to have all the marchers wear the black shirt as a uniform. That visible uniformity turned separate squads into a spectacle of cohesion and helped frame a central political dilemma: whether fascism should become a party or an army. Ravenna thus served as the destination for a display whose meaning extended beyond the city. The march suggested a party capable of rapidly converting its members into a fighting force.

The Crisis of July 1922

Ravenna reappears in July 1922 amid conflict between fascist and socialist unions over the transport of threshed wheat. A letter sent to Balbo reported that a fascist carter had been fatally beaten, that there had been general shooting, and that seven people were dead. The letter described the city as being in the hands of subversives and urged Balbo to come quickly. Balbo responded by ordering the squads of Romagna to march on Ravenna.

The order came while Benito Mussolini was in Rome speaking with political figures, seeking fascist entry into government or trying to prevent an antifascist government. From Rome, Michele Bianchi telegraphed Balbo on behalf of the party, demanding that he stop the violence because the campaign threatened to undermine those negotiations. But as the squads advanced, nine people had already died in the outskirts and rural areas. The distance between Rome and the countryside mattered: the party’s political calculations did not stop the local escalation.

The Punitive Expedition

Balbo ignored Bianchi’s reprimand. He threatened the police commissioner that the squads would burn the houses of Ravenna’s socialists unless he supplied a column of trucks with fuel within half an hour. The police chief supplied the trucks, and Balbo led the departing column. The episode shows local fascist power operating not only through the squads but also through pressure on public authorities to provide the means for their movement.

The campaign began at eleven in the morning on July 29 and ended at the same time the following day. For twenty-four hours, the squads moved through Rimini, Santarcangelo, Savignano, Cesena, Bertinoro, and the towns and countryside of the provinces of Forlì and Ravenna. Their passage was marked by fires, including the destruction of socialist and communist headquarters and houses described as red. They returned to Ravenna at dawn. In the account, the city is both the objective announced in the urgent letter and the point to which the column returned after its route of destruction.

Political Consequences and Significance

News of the return to Ravenna reached Rome as the political negotiations were under way. The talks stopped; Filippo Turati’s attempt to meet the king had come to nothing, and the socialists again proclaimed a general strike. The campaign therefore had consequences well beyond the places it traversed: violence intended as a local show of force helped close off a national political opening.

Across the two episodes, Ravenna’s role changes in scale and character. In 1921 it is the destination of a uniformed mass march that dramatizes the emergence of a fascist army; in 1922 it is the focus and endpoint of a punitive expedition that disregards party instructions and helps derail negotiations. The movement from parade to burning makes the tension between political organization and squad violence concrete. Ravenna is not merely a backdrop to that tension: its streets and surrounding countryside are where the book shows the consequences taking form.