Via San Damiano is a Milan street whose importance in the narrative gathers around the headquarters of Avanti!, the flagship newspaper of Italian socialism. The street connects the ordinary geography of newspaper offices and public demonstrations to moments of political violence: socialist crowds assemble along it, an attacker targets a procession from a nearby bridge, and the newspaper building is later besieged and burned. Its recurring role is therefore both physical and symbolic. Via San Damiano is a place where political opposition occupies the same urban ground, while the fate of a newspaper becomes a measure of how vulnerable public dissent has become.

Street, Newspaper, and Political Setting

The newspaper offices on Via San Damiano stand just behind Via Cerva, in a district where rival political circles are close enough for their activities to unfold almost side by side. The street is associated with a naviglio, or canal, whose bank becomes part of the setting for processions and gatherings. The relationship between street and newspaper is direct: in the narrative, Avanti! is not simply a publication reporting political conflict elsewhere. Its offices are a visible home of the socialist movement and, in turn, a target for those seeking to attack that movement.

One scene establishes the contrast through neighboring rooms. At a table associated with Benito Mussolini, conversation is subdued; next door, the staff of Avanti! sing the socialist anthem and toast the demonstrations of February 17. The singing recalls a procession of forty thousand striking workers, accompanied by thirty bands and thousands of red flags. That march had displayed a public opposition to the war just ended and demands that included land division and amnesty for deserters. The juxtaposition gives Via San Damiano a social as well as political character: different understandings of postwar Italy exist within the same compact urban environment, separated by little more than a wall.

The Assault on Avanti! Headquarters

The street’s most consequential early episode is the attack on Avanti! headquarters. Toward evening, the assailants arrive to find the building protected by uniformed soldiers. The account describes the defense as half-hearted, in part because some of the activists had previously served as the soldiers’ commanders. A siege develops, and after a guard is shot, an opening in the cordon allows a stretcher to pass. The attackers then move through the gap. The socialist defenders have already left through the rear of the building, so the assault proceeds without a sustained fight inside.

What follows is the systematic destruction of a working newspaper office. The attackers overturn desks, ruin typewriters and filing cabinets, damage the archive, and scatter lithographed images of Lenin that were prepared for distribution around Italy. The rotary presses present a different challenge from the portable equipment: they are heavy machines that clubs and daggers cannot easily disable. Edmondo Mazzucato, an Arditi veteran who had worked as a typesetter for revolutionary publications before the war, uses an iron bar to damage the machinery and set the presses in motion, destroying the equipment he once knew as a printer. The episode gives the assault a pointed reversal: a former worker in the revolutionary press turns his practical expertise against its material means of publication.

The building burns within half an hour. On Via San Damiano, police watch alongside the men who started the fire, while firefighters are prevented from intervening. The street thus becomes the public setting for both the destruction and its apparent tolerance. The attack eliminates more than a particular office: it wrecks the files, machines, and images through which a political movement could communicate and preserve its record. Its orderly, methodical character contrasts with the scale of the damage and makes the newspaper’s vulnerability central to the scene.

The Procession and the Bombing

Later in 1919, Via San Damiano is again the route of a socialist public gathering. After an electoral victory, thousands of people—men, women, and children—move along the canal bank, singing and carrying flags toward the Avanti! headquarters, where a rally is to take place. The crowd’s presence makes the street a place of collective political expression, but also exposes it to an attack planned from nearby.

Albino Volpi watches from the Bridge of the Sirenette, a short distance away. The narrative places him there after he has reached the bridge by passing through the garden of Palazzo Visconti, and depicts him carrying two Thévenot bombs and a dagger. He throws one bomb toward the procession. The explosion interrupts the singing and sends the crowd fleeing; Volpi takes a second bomb from his belt. The account in Corriere della Sera, dated November 18, 1919, describes the attacker as an unknown man on the cast-iron bridge and reports that fragments struck people near the front of the procession. It also records the panic and the attempt to pursue the assailant, who disappeared into the darkness. The narrative scene and the contemporary report thus meet at the same geography while presenting the event in different registers: one follows the attacker’s position and action, while the other gives the public account of an unidentified assailant and the procession’s response.

Aftermath and Narrative Significance

On November 18, authorities raid the Arditi Association headquarters on Via Cerva and seize grenades, pistols, daggers, maces, and ammunition. Captain Ferruccio Vecchi, Piero Bolzon, and Edmondo Mazzucato are arrested; Albino Volpi and other veterans suspected of involvement escape over the rooftops. The raid is not described as taking place on Via San Damiano itself, but it follows the attack on a procession there and draws attention to the nearby Arditi organization. The movement from the street to the neighboring headquarters connects public violence with the groups and weapons implicated in its aftermath.

Across these episodes, Via San Damiano is repeatedly tied to the means by which political movements become visible: a newspaper office, a procession, a rally, a song, a crowd, and the machines used to print political material. The street’s significance does not depend on being the site of every later national confrontation. Rather, the book gives it a concentrated local history in which socialist organization is first heard and seen in public, then subjected to attack, and finally represented through contrasting accounts of violence. Via San Damiano becomes a measure of the shrinking space between political disagreement and physical coercion, while the damaged headquarters stands as the clearest sign of what that shift does to the institutions of public speech.