The centenary of the March on Rome in October 2022 saw the publication of numerous works on the beginning of Italy’s Fascist regime. Claudio Natoli’s edited volume, originating from a conference held in October 2022 titled ‘One hundred years after the March on Rome: a historical and civic reflection’, adds to this wave. With contributions from some of Italy’s leading scholars of Fascism, the volume offers comprehensive and critical overviews of recent historiography and raises fundamental questions about the origins of Mussolini’s dictatorship.

A key theme of most chapters is, as Natoli explains in the introduction, the ‘inescapable continuity’ between the First World War and the postwar period – hence the title Marcia su Roma e dintorni, which echoes Emilio Lussu’s 1933 memoir published during his Paris exile, and suggests the need to situate the origins of Fascism within its wider ‘surroundings’. The essays collected in the first part examine the transformations of the liberal state that contributed to the advent of the regime. Giuliana Procacci, for instance, argues that the wartime establishment of a ‘state of exception’ and the expansion of extraordinary state powers prepared the ground for the anti-democratic involutions of the following years. Marco Mondini examines the convergence between Fascist militias and state authorities, showing that public security officials, prefects, magistrates, and especially army officers frequently displayed sympathy for, and complicity with, Fascist violence.

Aligning with a body of scholarship that has demonstrated that violence against organised labour long predated the years 1919–1922, both Claudio Natoli and Giulia Albanese emphasise the substantial continuity between the coercive practices of the liberal state in repressing social protest and the later brutality of Fascist squads. This longer trajectory is further illustrated by Mimmo Carrattieri, whose study of Emilia Romagna traces the mobilisation of the agrarian bloc against organised labour and the use of armed groups to break strikes back to the early twentieth century. A similar pattern is visible in the Parma area, where, as noted by Daniella Gagliani, agrarian elites had already organised systematic strikebreaking and formed armed volunteer bands by 1908, anticipating key features of the violence later associated with Fascism.

Situating violence and the repression of labour conflicts within a longer temporal perspective challenges the notion of Fascism as an inevitable response to ‘red’ violence and a necessary anticommunist counter-revolution – a myth that endured in the years after 1945 within conservative and moderate circles and, indeed, the neofascist world. The heavy-handed repression of workers’ demands started well before 1917 and was shaped less by preoccupations over defending the country from Communism than by the resistance of Italian political and economic elites to democratisation and its challenge to the socio-economic status quo.

As many contributions in the volume demonstrate, the so-called ‘red threat’ had, by 1920, little correspondence with reality. The failure of the factory occupations in Turin in 1920 led to a significant decline in social conflict. In his chapter on the notion of the ‘red biennium’, Fabio Fabbri reminds us that, despite its centrality in Fascist propaganda, it was not recognised by socialists and communists at the time. As Antonio Gramsci observed in a 1922 article, in 1920, often portrayed as the year of the ‘absolute power’ of Bolshevism in Italy, 616 workers were killed and 1,734 wounded in the streets and squares of the country. It was only in the mid-1960s that the Left began to adopt this characterisation of the years preceding Fascism, notably with Paolo Spriano, who in his 1964 book on the factory occupations of 1920 (L’occupazione delle fabbriche. Settembre 1920, Einaudi, Turin) described them as ‘the culminating episode of the red biennium’. Amid the resurgence of labour unrest in the 1960s and 1970s, the biennio rosso became a key point of reference, and a powerful myth, especially for the radical Left. And yet, as Aurelio Lepre has observed, those years were ‘red only in the dreams of Italian socialists and in the fears of the bourgeoisie’ (quote from Fabbri’s chapter).

The idea of the biennio rosso has long been central to the depiction of the years 1919–1922 as a ‘civil war’, another trope that recent historiography of Fascism has questioned. As Mimmo Carrattieri writes, strikes continued after 1920, but though there were numerous instances of red violence, the violence of organised labour ‘was quantitatively and qualitatively different from that of the fascists’ (p. 138). Roughly two-thirds of the approximately 2,000 victims were caused by fascists. Moreover, Carrattieri notes, all recent research goes beyond mere homicide statistics, considering the many forms of physical violence (especially mutilations and lasting trauma) as well as ‘low-intensity’ violence, which nevertheless restricted victims’ daily lives. On a qualitative level, he adds, the fundamental difference lies in the organised and militarised nature of fascist action. Daniella Gagliani writes that on a national scale, in the first six months of 1921, 726 offices of workers’ organisations were destroyed, including 119 Chambers of Labour (p. 219). In Claudio Natoli’s words, if there was a civil war, ‘it was instigated and carried out by only one side, with the decisive active support or connivance of state apparatuses and the cover of the old ruling class’ (p. 22).

The book ends with a section on popular antifascism, including a fascinating chapter by Alessandro Portelli on people’s use of songs as a means of resistance and Gagliani’s analysis on the armed resistance to Fascism in 1922 in the city of Parma. In this episode, inhabitants of Parma’s working-class Oltretorrente districts, led by the antifascist organisation Arditi del Popolo, successfully opposed an assault by Fascist blackshirts. Their remarkable success and, equally importantly, the disavowal of the Arditi del Popolo by Italian socialists and communists, would turn Parma’s antifascist resistance into one of the most celebrated and iconic episodes within far-left circles during the 1970s.

Compared with earlier sections on the political, institutional and social context against which Fascism built its power, popular antifascism and cultural issues are given little space in the volume, which is surprising if one considers cultural historians’ enormous contribution to the study and understanding of Fascism over recent years. However, this limitation aside, this edited collection provides a rich and in-depth analysis of the socio-political dynamics that enabled the rise of Fascism, offering thoughtful insights and a clear framework for understanding both state and extra-state violence in early twentieth-century Italy.