The Tuscan roots of fascism

In the squads there is everything. The backbone formed by the arditi, the veterans of the Great War. Many are very young. Others are professional criminals. Some are inexperienced: it happens that they injure themselves, even if the responsibility is passed on to the opponent. a kind of class struggle in reverse. Another Florentine fascist, Umberto Banchelli, known as the magician, testifies to this. He is not a tender type: he beats the traders who reject the fascist justice and the lowering of prices; he compiles ban lists with the names of subversives, forced to choose between death and exile, as in the time of civil wars in ancient Rome. But Banchelli of popular origin, and he does not like the things he has seen the sons of the lawyer, the doctor, the supplier do: it was enough for a crowd of these to meet people dressed as workers, for the executioners to beat with holy reason.

Italy is conquered piece by piece, and the punitive expeditions are concentrated on the rebel areas. Like the Apuan Alps, the land of marble quarrymen, where a strong anarchist and worker tradition resists. The commissioner of Massa, strict with the fascists, was removed and replaced by his deputy Giustiniani: his son, one of the leaders of the squads. The Massa prosecutor informs that the judiciary will not proceed against the fascists, who feel they have their hands free. On 5 June 1921 they enter Pontremoli, on 12 they clean up Portovenere by killing an anarchist.

Sarzana to resist. The population does not like the fascists, even more so since thirty armed men entered the city and opened fire at random, killing a seventy-year-old looking out the window. On 15 July an entrepreneur was killed in an ambush near Carrara. a red crime, which unleashes black reprisals. Two days later, a hundred men destroy the cooperative and the socialist circle of Monzone, a mountain village, killing two workers and a farmer.

Mimmo Franzinelli writes: The stop for lunch in Aulla was enlivened by the beating of an anarchist; in the afternoon the teams headed to Santo Stefano di Magra, where they massacred the farmer Edoardo Vannucci and searched several houses in search of weapons (but the operation yielded money and jewels). The trucks arrived near Sarzana in the evening and the squadristi killed Rinaldo Spadaccini as he returned home after the afternoon fishing. This time the police react and arrest the head of the black shirts, Renato Ricci, with ten other comrades. The fascists respond, from Tuscany and Liguria several armed columns aim at Sarzana. An avant-garde shot and killed a peasant from Ameglia, working in the fields. The population rebels. Two young squads, 19-year-old Augusto Bisagno and 17-year-old Amedeo Maiani, sent to look for reinforcements, are captured and lynched. A horrible death: the mutilated bodies thrown into a ravine will only be found after a week.

Then when the march on Rome starts, in Florence Italo Balbo goes in person to the headquarters of the Country, to inspect the first page; and since he does not like him, he has it rewritten, inventing news of great successes of the insurgents, including a meeting that never took place between Mussolini and a delegation sent by the king. The director, Aldo Borelli, does not object. He will be awarded years later with the direction of the Corriere della Sera.

In the meantime, however, the Tuscan fascists have really grasped a success: at the Florence station three hundred black shirts took control of a train that managed to escape the military and leave for Rome: the arrival scheduled for 9.50 of the morning. Another convoy left from Pisa. then the king – who rushed to Rome from his Tuscan estate of San Rossore – gave up and refused to sign the state of siege. The sovereign emphasizes the fascist threat. Actually he doesn’t trust the army. And he fears that the Duke of Aosta is plotting, in agreement with Mussolini, to take the throne from him. the turning point. And the beginning of a national tragedy.