During the high tide of “squadrismo,” members of the Fasci Italiani di Combattimento movement, who would form the official Fascist party by 1922, mobilized tens of thousands, even hundreds of thousands, of Italian men who carried out thousands of acts of brutal violence within their own communities and neighboring cities, towns, villages, and hamlets.
Before this “takeoff” in provincial fascism, the Fascists were initially an urban phenomenon, motivated primarily by nationalism. They desired revenge against the Socialists and others who had not supported Italy’s participation in the Great War. Even before the war’s end, veterans who would later become Fascists were calling for the extirpation of Italy’s “internal enemies,” whom they held responsible for Italy’s crushing defeat to the Austro-Hungarian and German forces at the 1917 Battle of Caporetto.1 Fascist attacks against Socialists, according to Benito Mussolini, were like assaults “on an Austrian trench.” He declared, “This is heroism…This is the violence of which I approve and which I exalt. This is the violence of Fascism.”2
