Teatro Lirico in Milan was the setting for the Second National Congress of the Fasci di Combattimento in May 1920. Its significance in the narrative lies in the contrast between the congress’s carefully staged public ceremony and the political realignment worked out inside: by the close of the meeting, Benito Mussolini had redirected the movement away from much of its founding program and toward cooperation with established institutions and conservative forces.

The Congress and Its Setting

The congress opened on May 23 with the presentation of new pennants to the Arditi and the fascists. The ceremony gave the stage a deliberately martial and patriotic arrangement: flags, uniformed soldiers standing in a semicircle, and choirs of young girls beneath the banners. Ferruccio Vecchi received the Arditi pennant, while Mussolini accepted the fascist one. The ceremony’s pageantry made the theater more than a neutral meeting room; it presented the movement as an organized force even as its actual membership remained limited.

The congress’s formal proceedings began on May 24. The discrepancy between the elaborate opening and the sparse organization was plain in the auditorium. The reported national total was 2,375 enrolled fascists: 600 in Milan, 300 in Cremona, and 300 in the capital, with much smaller groups elsewhere. The Teatro Lirico audience was not much larger than the gathering at Piazza San Sepolcro, despite the year that had passed since the movement’s foundation.

A Changing Audience

The attendees’ composition had changed more than their numbers. Demobilized soldiers and political misfits remained, but left-wing interventionist unionists and republicans, including Pietro Nenni, had departed. Idealist nationalists had gone to Fiume, while the aspiring writers and unemployed journalists associated with the movement’s earlier circle were less visible. In their place sat shopkeepers, civil servants, and low-ranking managers in the worn clothes of a petite bourgeoisie strained by inflation. The meeting thus registered a change in social constituency as well as political direction.

The congress was also divided over what that change should mean. Cesare Rossi spoke with anger rooted in his earlier revolutionary unionism, but his hostility now turned against the peasants who had once supported revolt. Filippo Tommaso Marinetti and the futurists resisted the rightward turn: Marinetti attacked the monarchy and the Vatican and rejected a move toward reaction. Their opposition made the coming shift visible inside the assembly, even as it failed to prevent it.

The Turn to the Right

During the congress, Mussolini’s close supporters met for supper at a trattoria in Bottonuto, behind the theater. Umberto Pasella counted membership cards, Giovanni Marinelli reviewed the accounts, and the group discussed centralizing the organization, retaining the Milanese central committee’s authority over provincial secretaries, and deciding which local federations would receive funds. These organizational questions accompanied the larger political dispute: control of the movement’s resources would help determine its direction.

When the evening session resumed, Mussolini argued for cooperation between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie and for a reduced role for the liberal state’s institutions. He set aside any fixed commitment to republicanism, allowing that the monarchy could be retained, and urged respect for religion as a political force. In less than twenty minutes, the congress had moved decisively away from the San Sepolcro program. The following morning, the proceedings ended with a changed central committee: ten of the original nineteen members were reelected; Marinetti and Carli resigned the next day; and nine new members, all from the provinces and all on the right, entered the committee.

Narrative Significance

The Teatro Lirico episode places political transformation in a concrete public space. Its flags, uniforms, and ceremonial arrangement project unity, while the modest enrollment, changing audience, internal dissent, and disputes over organization expose the movement’s uncertain foundations. The congress’s decisive result emerges not from a sudden expansion of the crowd but from a shift in policy and leadership. In the account, the theater is therefore the setting for a political conversion: a movement formed amid anti-establishment and revolutionary currents turns toward accommodation with the monarchy, religious authority, and bourgeois interests.