In the summer of 1926, rising tension in the locality of Cavriglia, Tuscany, finally exploded with a very public brawl between musicians of the town's fascist band. The fight was so bad that the fascist authorities called for an external disciplinary hearing. Investigators found three main causes for the altercation: ‘selfish personal interest, ambition, and jealousy over women’.Footnote 1 The disciplinary report was damning for Cavriglia's fascist organisation, which was dissolved soon after. It stated that the men of Cavriglia had little grasp of what being fascist involved. What is more, the report claimed that the fight was a symptom of a more deep-rooted issue: ‘In Cavriglia la lotta di campanile (parochial fighting), still reigns … and has painful repercussions for the municipality’.Footnote 2 The report thus emphasised local character and the phenomenon of rural parochialism, known in Central Italy as campanilismo. For the regime, campanilismo was an unwanted hangover from a corrupt liberal past. It was alien to fascist nationalist values and it evidenced the stunted character of provincial Italians.
Cavriglia was not an isolated case. It was representative of the challenges that the provincial fascist movement faced and how the fascist hierarchy characterised these challenges. From the outset of the fascist takeover, provincial fascist leaders used local newspapers to vent their frustrations with the slow, parochial nature of municipal councils now under fascist control. One article from 1923 in Giovinezza, a Tuscan fascist newspaper, criticised widespread in-fighting in the region's local administrations: ‘Too much of the liberal and democratic mentality is still in us…’.Footnote 3 The revolution would never be complete, the writer complained, if provincial fascists were unable to work towards a common, national fascist future.
But campanilismo was not specific to the fascist era. It was rooted in a rural culture that went back centuries. Campanilismo was a complex phenomenon that guided rural communities, drawing them together in an elaborate patchwork of kinship, rivalry and alliance. It was a framework for rural life – at once an expression of local pride and the groundings on which conflict would occur and tension be released. It is precisely here, in its complex local functions, that campanilismo differed from other forms of provincial culture. Historians have demonstrated how distinctive European localisms tied the local to the nation. In Germany, the idea of Heimat framed small towns and provincial territories as the physical and symbolic landscapes – the common denominator – of abstract national identity.Footnote 4 In Spain, el terruño or la patria chica denoted what Helen Graham has usefully described as ‘the lived unit of existence’.Footnote 5 These terms, nonetheless, fed into an ideal of Spanish national consciousness.Footnote 6 With its nostalgic exaltation of folklore and rural traditions, the Italian idea of piccola patria was more akin to these forms of localism; through it the fascist movement aimed to de-politicise local culture and elevate it to national importance, and in doing so establish a common national sentiment that stemmed from provincial life.Footnote 7
Campanilismo, too, was a marker of identity. But beyond this it was practical and political, having evolved with the tradition on the Italian peninsula of highly independent municipalities. In contrast to Heimat or Spanish regionalism, campanilismo was not related to ideas of national identity; rather, it was a longstanding framework for rural life that encompassed the web of interpersonal relationships, power dynamics and identities that were specific to each rural community. At its heart was a sense of rivalry that pitted villages against one another, and that served as a defence mechanism for them to maintain their own specific territorial and cultural integrity. Owing to its individualistic and defensive features, campanilismo was not conducive to centralised nation-building processes. Studying how the fascist movement defined and related to campanilismo is, therefore, crucial to our understanding of how fascism evolved in highly rural spaces and communities, and how these communities responded to fascist rule.
The worlds of interpersonal relationships that existed in local communities made up the foundations of provincial life; it was into these worlds that extreme events, such as the rise of fascism, erupted.Footnote 8 These local situations do not necessarily reflect the macro experience of fascism but rather show us unique instances of how and where fascism manifested in specific communities. With campanilismo as a focal point, we can trace how fascist practices impacted traditional community structures and, in turn, how these structures twisted fascist strategies of conquest. To do this, I use campanilismo in two ways: as a lens to examine the dynamics of ordinary provincial life at a microlevel, and as an analytical category to tease apart the tensions that existed between fascism and local systems of life. Central to this analysis are the inhabitants of the rural communities I study, who one way or another engaged with fascism, whose relationship with the movement may have been complex, and who the fascist movement readily disregarded as provincial and backwards. I use the term ‘ordinary citizens’ to describe these individuals collectively, although they shaped their lives in an extraordinary social and political context marked by fascist violence. Where possible, I refer to individuals according to their village provenance to reveal their shared parochial identity.Footnote 9
In line with the strength of local particularity across Italy, provincial fascist movements in the early 1920s developed according to local contexts and did not adhere to one monolithic fascist structure.Footnote 10 In the province of Arezzo, and across much of Tuscany, agrarian fascism was markedly reactionary and violent, as it took on a well organised and entrenched socialist peasant movement.Footnote 11 If Mussolini's dictatorship began in 1924, the conditions for its control were founded in the terror of fascist violence of the immediate postwar. To analyse how the distinctive strand of agrarian fascism of Arezzo entered the constellation of villages and towns that made up the rural province, I draw from Alltagsgeschichte and microstoria. By focusing on ‘highly concrete micro-historical settings’, not only do we reveal overlooked peculiarities of local life but, crucially, we gain perspective on processes of social change.Footnote 12 In this case, examining the impact of fascist violence on campanilismo and vice-versa illustrates the disintegration of established community structures. Ground level examples from the area show the challenges that the regime faced in its attempts to rule over citizens whose identities were immeasurably attached to the local space, its cultures and traditions. Moreover, these examples demonstrate the tendency of the fascist movement to use campanilismo either as a motive for its failings or as a rhetorical strategy to impose a centralised ideal of fascism over the varied provincial versions.
Historians of fascist Italy, too, have cited campanilismo to explain the failures of the regime in the provinces, citing the ‘closed off universes’ of rural territories, their isolating topographic features, familial ties and the abundance of personal disputes.Footnote 13 Paul Corner and Valeria Galimi have argued that resorting to campanilismo to explain the disjointed fascist programme in the provinces blinds us to other factors, such as the relationship between local elites and the centre.Footnote 14 In studying the interaction between fascism and campanilismo, I aim to turn this discussion on its head. I argue that fascist violence wore down the positive structures of parochial trust in provincial society, which for centuries had helped rural communities negotiate their co-existence. Breaking down these structures – notably with violence – caused local networks of trust to collapse. The functional mechanisms of campanilismo were replaced by dysfunctional and violent practices that suppressed communal life. Forms of village cohesion did survive, exemplified best by small acts of resistance, but the blunt force of fascism was transformative for rural society.
To address the complex interplay between fascism and systems of rural life, this article covers three main areas. First, it discusses the phenomenon of campanilismo in more depth, placing it in the context of the province of Arezzo. Second, it looks at the fascist strategy to conquer the provincial space. Finally, it demonstrates how campanilismo worked within and against the fascist movement. Extracts from diaries, memoirs, fascist correspondence and local newspapers illustrate how the citizens of rural Arezzo adapted to this violent process.
Campanilismo and Community
As a political and social entity, the comune (municipality) has a long history on the Italian peninsula. In his work on Renaissance Italy, Edward Muir conceptualised the idea of the comune as a physical space, as social interaction and as a process of exclusion.Footnote 15 Central to Muir's depiction of community life in the comune is the notion of ‘thin trust’, the trust that existed between complete strangers or mere acquaintances based on their shared provenance. The physical spaces of the comune, its piazze and churches, narrow closes and taverns, its winding rivers, forests and fields offered venues for frequent and repeated social exchange, which ‘thickened’ the ‘thin trust’ that existed across the community.Footnote 16 It was in these spaces that ordinary citizens experienced the ebbs and flows of the everyday, where information was gathered and dispersed, tensions reckoned with, social bonds formed and the mundanities of local life played out. This thin trust was intimately woven into the unique physical and material manifestations of the community. Of course, twentieth-century provincial Italy was not Muir's Renaissance society. Nonetheless, physical space and thin trust retained their centrality to life in rural communities over the centuries. Connecting the physical spaces of the village, town or territory to the social structures of these communities leads us to ask how individuals encountered that space, determined its quality and developed their own relationship to it.Footnote 17
Diary extracts and memoirs of individuals from these small communities convey the significance of space in the rural setting. When writing her memoirs of growing up in rural Tuscany in the 1930s, Dina Brogi recalled that as a child she could feel the atmosphere of her community change at night as locals from all around congregated at the communal water fountain.
When evening fell, especially in summer, this space would fill up with people with all kinds of receptacles. Numerous peasant women would arrive, jugs tucked under their arms, with coarse, dark aprons held up by a clip, and with a handkerchief in their hair, tied behind their neck. They looked like Russian matryoshka.Footnote 18
Brogi's account may well be tinged with nostalgia for a past childhood. Nevertheless, spaces such as the communal water fountain were essential to communities for the ordinary yet critical functions they provided. The water fountain was a central point for the entire village, not just one segment of it, and was exactly the kind of space where thin trust would be thickened, as neighbours interacted with each other and spread local news.
Other descriptions of towns and villages in the area paint familiar pictures of rural life. One memoir described Badia al Pino as a group of buildings perched on a small hill dominated by the parish church. The town's youths would congregate at the central piazza when not working in the fields, while younger boys would kick a football (the prized possession of the vet's son) against the wall of the council watchman's hut; most wore wooden clogs, but a lucky few enjoyed leather soles on their feet.Footnote 19 During the chestnut harvest children were taken out of school to spend their days working in the forests. In the mid-1930s, one primary school teacher from Caprese Michelangelo, an Apennine town in the northeast of Arezzo, wrote of her desperation at harvest time: ‘How much better off they are here, writing, instead of out there in the bush, under the slow rain, harvesting chestnuts … with the help of God I hope they will become good, strong and brave, just as our Duce wants them.’Footnote 20
Villages were intimate places broken by distances of rugged mountainous terrain and harsh weather conditions. Life in these areas was tough, and hardy people were forged out of this deep connection with and dependence on the land: people whose knowledge of that land was matched, perhaps only by their knowledge of their local village. It was in the intimate spaces of the comune, amid the unforgiving landscape outside it, that ordinary citizens came to witness and experience for themselves the turbulence of fascism.Footnote 21 And it was in these spaces that fissures developed between community members, and where fascism became most evident.
Recalling life as a child in the village of Bucine, Guglielmo Francini described how social class was a marker of fascism. He remembered a group of boys (‘daddy's boys’)Footnote 22 who would spread malicious rumours about suspected local communists. Francini writes that, unlike him, they were not the sons of peasant farmers but were privileged and included the sons of a shopkeeper, a fascist leader and a landowner. When they tried to persuade Francini to join the fascist youth organisation, he said he would but that he did not have the eight lire registration fee. Besides, he claimed that peasant boys were never allowed on fascist marches because they were deemed too scruffy.Footnote 23 On another occasion, not being able to pay the registration fee landed the young Francini in trouble with the local fascists, who branded him an ‘antifascist traitor of the fatherland’.Footnote 24
The reliability of diaries and memoirs, such as Francini's (written in 1960), poses an issue for historians. The ‘fog of emotion and uncertainty that clouds the normal passage of time’, alongside authorial memory, hindsight and a more comprehensive understanding of the fascist regime surely influenced these memoirs.Footnote 25 Moreover, there are questions of self-representation in the context of a repressive regime or, indeed, in the highly contentious memory politics that came after. Many memoirs clearly distance the author from the fascist movement or convey general indifference to it. While in any given case this may well be true, the subjectivity of such accounts raises questions about how far we can take these sources at face value. Recognising their subjectivity, however, does not diminish their historical value. Rather, it encourages us to rethink how we look at them, asking ‘not just what an autobiography says, but why and how…’.Footnote 26 Conveyed implicitly and explicitly throughout Francini's and other accounts is the importance of communal space and a clear sense of power dynamics in that space, often marked by class and transmitted across generations. This information helps us to reconstruct a sense of how individuals perceived and interacted with their communities.
It was in these village spaces and social relationships that we find campanilismo. Rudolph Bell ties campanilismo to a traditional way of life that rooted rural Italian peasants to their place of birth and its immediate surroundings.Footnote 27 More than a simple form of parochial patriotism, campanilismo (literally translated as one's attachment to the village belfry, or campanile) governed practical dimensions of local life, and was expressed in knowledge passed down over generations that planted the village firmly in space and time. It could be related to very real and significant rights one might enjoy as a member of a particular community, for example the right to hunt, to forage for fungi, chestnuts or berries, or to collect firewood from a designated forest. It could even determine an individual's access to parcels of land for cultivation.Footnote 28 Following this unwritten code meant sharing resources with one's neighbours, and the entire system relied on a base level of mutual trust and social recognition. This extended to the economic organisation of these communities. Various accounts tell us that peasant farmers would rarely see money and instead paid for services, such as shoe repair by the cobbler, with olive oil or other produce. In one town, the local blacksmith stood out as one of the few to receive money for his work.Footnote 29 Unique village practices also stretched to food production, which was often a community experience, like the annual pig slaughter where labour and resulting produce were equally shared.Footnote 30
Some communal practices of village life remained largely stable over centuries. This is not, however, to paint a picture of a longue durée of a rural Tuscan society untouched by modernity. Industrialisation had swept across the region, while the consequences of the First World War brought irreversible transformation and tension to Italian society that could not be managed by the mechanisms of old liberal politics.Footnote 31 But this was not a cut and dried shift, and often the old combined with the new. For example, the turbulent years 1919–20 saw spontaneous pre-industrial forms of protest (peasant land occupations, assaults launched on communal ovens, confiscations of produce and attacks on centres of power) merge with elements of the new century (mass politicisation, trade unionism, socialism, Bolshevism, and so on).Footnote 32 Intertwined with peasant mobilisation in this period, the nationalist right developed a virulent reactionary strain: agrarian elites formed armed ‘self-defence’ groups to combat peasant organisation, the state colluded in violent suppression and fascist paramilitary violence dragged Italy into what many considered a civil war.Footnote 33 Even as this hybrid of old and new forms of political mobilisation and political violence emerged in rural society, mobility remained limited and the strong ties of kinship and local power dynamics continued to dominate rural life, ‘making little reference to the centre’.Footnote 34
The disconnection between rural life and national politics is evident in a joke made by a Tuscan landowner about the ignorance of the rural population. Writing to his friend in 1919, Alfonso B. recounted a conversation with one of his contadini (peasant farmers). The farmer was anxiously awaiting the return of his son from the war and commented on the question of Gabriele D'Annunzio's occupation of the city of Fiume: ‘The last thing we need is to fight over a river; we have so much water in Italy already, we could easily do without it and leave it to others’.Footnote 35 Ideas of national irredentism, territorial expansion, or of the implications of Italy as a modern state were vague for many, or at least this was the perception from the outside. Certainly, the human cost of these grand ideas was all too well understood in rural areas. Nevertheless, the village as the centre of life remained steadfast.
The seemingly ancient traditions that bound villagers to their villages were also expressed through campanilismo. It was ‘a conserving and preserving force, defined by birth … circumscribing the present by the past’.Footnote 36 The expression of individuality and tradition gave integrity to a village and its villagers; and this integrity was reinforced by the existence of many campaniles in proximity. The identity of il paese (town/village) was not just created in opposition to other paesi, but alongside them too.
Anthropologists have demonstrated the centrality of campanilismo to rural life. Herman Tak claims that ‘campanilismo in Central Italy is a boundary mechanism that is connected to the closeness and commitment between villages’.Footnote 37 Taken in this sense, campanilismo was an unwritten framework to communal life: it arbitrated over the immediate space in and around il paese, protecting that space from the outside. This did not necessarily mean excluding the outside, but rather reinforcing specific identities. As part of this framework, parochial conflict was integral to the coexistence of villages as it offered an outlet for tension and a path for mediation. Such conflict translated into general antagonism between villages, usually based on ideas of superiority – a common practice being the proliferation of derogatory nicknames.Footnote 38 Other forms included quarrels over resources, questions of municipal politics or rivalries linked to tradition. Take the municipality of Civitella della Chiana in Arezzo, for example. Between 1922 and 1926, the fascist council struggled to get past the issue of administrative separatism, as the village of Civitella sought to split from the existing municipality and establish its own council. The rift was responsible for the resignation of one mayor and the attempted resignation of several councillors, and it received far more attention from the council in those years than any matter of fascist governance.Footnote 39
At times, parochial antagonism may have isolated communities from one another, but it was also a way for them to express pride and rivalry. Through the negotiation of local tension, communities would come to understand the principles and practices that defined them.Footnote 40 This antagonistic feature of campanilismo was, therefore, a valuable function of rural life that bonded the inhabitants of the dense constellation of mountain and valley-floor villages of rural Arezzo. The imposition of fascist rule and the fascist occupation of the physical space of these communities eroded the mediating facets of campanilismo, causing communal solidarity to wane.
Remoulding Local Values: Violence and Tradition as the Tools of Provincial Fascism
In Arezzo, fascist celebrations of local heritage became a common feature of the provincial calendar. These events complemented squadrismo (fascist paramilitary) activity, the principal objective of which was to systematically destroy all traces of democratic life, erasing any gains made by local peasant movements.Footnote 41 A three-day medieval fair held in the town of Bibbiena, in the north of the province in October 1923, provides us with an example. The main leaflet created for the event reflected the fascist policy of appealing to local identity as a tool for broader nationalisation.
And think, that in this first bond with your town, with your small region of birth, with your PICCOLA PATRIA (small fatherland), lies the first foundation, solid and powerful, of that vast bond of endless love that unites us all in the devote worship of our shared GRANDE PATRIA (great fatherland): Italy.Footnote 42
The purpose of the fascist characterisation of the piccola patria was to create a feeling of national adhesion that ran from one's village upwards: il paese, the centre of all life for its inhabitants, was now more than ever characterised as the soul of a greater national ideal. Patriotism was now locally sourced. As in Nazi Germany and Francoist Spain, fascists tapped into local traditions, celebrating romanticised rural culture as the true culture of the nation. In Germany, the Nazis used Heimat to imbue local populations with the national socialist ideology of race, blood and destiny.Footnote 43 In Spain, the Franco regime elevated local Spanish tradition as the ‘authentic’ spiritual basis for its authoritarian Spanish nation.Footnote 44 Ideologically, fascist localism was about winding back the clock to a time of deep conservatism and marked social and gender hierarchies.
Fascists in Central Italy latched on to pre-existing local revitalisation movements that had roots in complex social processes related to the societal transformations brought by modernity.Footnote 45 In celebrating local traditions with a distinct fascist brand, the regime aimed to gain legitimacy in the provinces and to encourage ties between the rural elites and the centre.Footnote 46 Among the leading advocates of this policy was a group of provincial leaders and fascist ‘thinkers’ who identified themselves as the strapaese (ultra-localists) and who considered local culture to be at the centre of an alternative fascist modernity. Through their publication Il Selvaggio, these ultra-localists connected modern fascism to an imagined and romanticised past, lauding, for example, ‘the ancient and very young Italy of traditions and transformations’.Footnote 47 The strategy worked to a limited extent: in rural Arezzo many supported fascist efforts to regenerate provincial folklore, enjoying the popular events and feeling that they resonated with collective memories of the past.Footnote 48 In its entirety, however, this strand of localism was never sufficiently embedded in Italian society to conjure a sense of national identity as strong as that achieved by Heimat.Footnote 49
Rather than investigating the national-cultural values fascism sought to create around the revival of provincial traditions, I prefer to focus on the interplay between fascist attempts to exalt local culture and the violence of the fascist rise to power in peripheral areas. It is in this interaction between culture and violence that we can most effectively uncover the impact of fascism on local communities, and therefore, on the structures of campanilismo – which, for the regime, was the wrong kind of local culture. In Arezzo, fascistised events like the medieval fair in Bibbiena went hand-in-hand with sustained paramilitary violence. From 1920, squadristi (fascist paramilitaries) violently attacked democratic and anti-fascist structures across provincial Italy, disrupting established features of community life. Alongside this violence, the medieval fairs of Bibbiena, and scores of other fascist celebrations across Arezzo laid the groundwork for a new fascist vision of local heritage and society. Complementary to one another, these two aspects of early fascism in the provinces forced ordinary citizens into situations of feeling both fear and pride: fear to discourage resistance and ensure compliance, pride to tie the movement to the piccola patria and consolidate the fascist vision of the nation.
The leaflet for the Bibbiena fair celebrated the piccola patria but separated this new form of localism from the parochial factionalism of old. The font, art and vocabulary used were evocative of Bibbiena's imagined medieval origins, while poetic descriptions historicised the local struggles between the factions of the area to a pre-fascist era. The fascist organisers of the fair made a point of distinguishing between damaging parochial violence, and the new, heroic violence of the squadristi.
In the dark conflicts and bloody struggles of factions, discord and fighting were sparked in olden times, between the castles of your ancestors; and from their embattled towers, treachery, revenge, and slaughter brooded between neighbouring brothers. … Today the sad rancour that existed between town walls, and between castles has been expunged and destroyed in the great purifying and renovating fire of national unity.Footnote 50
Fascist violence, which was as brutal as any form of medieval violence, was euphemised in the leaflet as the ‘renovating fire of national unity’. It was this heroic violence in the name of the national cause that would overcome the local factionalism epitomised by campanilismo.
A diary from the fascio (local fascist branch) of Strada Casentino, only eight miles from Bibbiena, is a case in point.Footnote 51 Written in 1935 by the group's founding members (three medical students from Strada studying in Florence), the document retraced the organisation's early punitive expeditions.Footnote 52 The geographic proximity between the fair in Bibbiena and the activities of the group in Strada Casentino illustrates the tight connection between fascist discourses of revitalised localism and locally sourced violence perpetrated in the name of fascism. The group's first excursions in 1920 were within Strada Casentino and to other nearby villages in the comune, where they ousted socialist councillors, handed out ‘healthy thrashings’ and ‘cleaned the towns’ with their ‘persuasive truncheons’.Footnote 53 The language of the squadristi dehumanised and de-nationalised their adversaries: ‘red beasts’ or ‘rabid dogs’ were favoured labels for socialists.Footnote 54 In Strada Casentino, the fascio replaced parochial characterisations with political labels for local towns targeted by the group: ‘subversive lairs’ (Poppi), ‘where communism had not yet surrendered’ (Borgo alla Collina), ‘where there were few fascists’ (Borgo alla Collina), ‘where the comune was in the hands of socialists’ (Montemignaio), and in one case, ‘a centre of popolari (members of the Christian Popular Party) led by the priest’ (Caiano). Likewise, their victims were labelled as ‘agitators’, ‘subversives’, ‘suspect’, ‘drunk on wine’, ‘communist’, or a combination of any of these. An entry for July 1921, for example, tells us that one squadrista was forced to fire his revolver into the air to ‘defend himself’ against a ‘howling and menacing mob of subversives’.Footnote 55 Thus, with florid descriptions the diary juxtaposed the courage of the fascists against the savagery of those who opposed them.
These descriptions were political and sinister, far from the campanilistic verbal antagonism that characterised the area. Tak's anthropological analysis of collective nicknames in Versilia, another mountainous area of Tuscany, shows us the types of labels that proliferated under the loose system of campanilismo. Nicknames included ‘lumaconi’ (big snails/lazy), ‘fagiolini’ (beans/idiots), ‘burrai’ (buttermakers), ‘carbonai’ (charcoal burners), ‘gobbi’ (hunchbacks), ‘ranocchi’ (frogs/disabled/from an area full of frogs), ‘grottaioli’ (cave-dwellers), ‘gentiluomini’ (gentlemen), or ‘schiaccioni di faggiuoli’ (bruised beechnuts).Footnote 56 On the one hand, these nicknames exposed the degrading and defensive feature of campanilismo, whether by referencing physical traits or mocking ‘uncivilised’ behaviours.Footnote 57 On the other hand, through references to particular flora and fauna or commercial activities, they matched up to the landscapes and specific qualities of different villages and their inhabitants. Changing from place to place, parochial nicknames helped to set boundaries between villages and to build a vocabulary of local knowledge about a village's networks and prejudices.Footnote 58 They were, therefore, robust expressions of rivalry and knowledge that fed into the guiding framework of campanilismo.
Internal nicknames were also part of the cultural praxis of the squadristi. In contrast to parochial labels, however, these nicknames were largely centred around the appetite for violence, if not recalling past national heroes. Fascist paramilitary groups across Central Italy included ‘The Tormentors’, ‘The Devils’, ‘The Black Wolves’, and ‘The Knights of Death’.Footnote 59 Self-generated nicknames for groups and their members were both a symptom of and a catalyst for the close bonds that drew squadristi together. Sven Reichardt argues that the intense camaraderie that men found in their groups superseded any sense of belonging to a local community, a phenomenon that was also true for provincial SA groups in Nazi Germany.Footnote 60 It was this lived intensity of social bonds that ultimately made violence possible.Footnote 61
Violence became a vocation for group members and had many functions. Alessandro Saluppo has illustrated the ‘pedagogical’ feature of fascist violence, citing how Mussolini encouraged fascists to ‘batter obstinate skulls’ as an educative method against subversive thinking.Footnote 62 Humiliation was weaponised: castration, rape, the forced ingestion of castor oil, the shaving of heads, and the cutting of fascist symbols and slogans onto victims’ bodies were all documented methods of the squadristi.Footnote 63 The performative quality of the violence added to its horror and gave it a lasting impact.Footnote 64 On a market day in Strada Casentino in October 1921, for example, the local fascio met in the town's butcher's shop run by one of their members, where they armed themselves with butchers’ knives before storming into the village to publicly challenge anyone who might have antifascist sympathies.Footnote 65 On another occasion, visiting squadristi from Prato (Tuscany) encountered a group of ‘menacing’ tenant farmers ‘armed with scythes’ on the road into Borgo alla Collina (‘where there were few fascists’). In the ensuing mêlée, one farmer was killed ‘by a severe trauma to his skull’.Footnote 66 Police reports from Arezzo corroborate the level of violence described in the diary, showing that gunfights, beatings, intimidations, brawls, killings, and castor oil humiliations were all part of life in the Aretine province at this time.Footnote 67 So pervasive and disturbing was this violence that it ‘violated the most basic assumptions about safety, human empathy and care. Familiar and viable realities were shattered into meaningless, chaotic and terrifying settings.’Footnote 68 This was not a question of a parochial dispute but rather a campaign of terror designed to condition the everyday and take control of local space. Sites of community and of communal solidarity – be it at the market, on the road into the village, or in the piazza – were now stained by the memory and lingering threat of nightmarish violence. On many occasions this violence was perpetrated by visiting squadristi from the wider region. Frequently, however, squadristi belonged to the very communities on whom they inflicted punishment.
Fascism in the provinces was local; squadristi violence was often fratricidal. John Foot has characterised the violence of the squadristi as private and collective, criminal (but not seen as such), political and personal: on many occasions it was about ‘settling old scores’.Footnote 69 Perpetrators may well have known their victims; they may have belonged to the same parish, bartered together at the market, attended the same village festivals, been treated by the same doctors, and so on. They were ordinary members of provincial society, not outsiders. A sample from the town of Badia al Pino evidences this. Of the forty-one members of the local fascio in June 1923, there were eight tenant farmers, seven farm labourers, five landowners, three cobblers, two carpenters, two tailors, one council employee, one bricklayer, one pensioner, one shopkeeper, one student, one roadman, one postman, one post office employee, one mechanic, one soldier and one privately employed worker.Footnote 70 The sample is representative of a wider trend of underrepresentation of the working classes in the squadristi ranks, and of the overrepresentation of landowners, tenant farmers, and middleclass burghers.Footnote 71 Significantly, of the forty-one members, thirty-one had served in the military and twenty had endured the trenches of the First World War, highlighting the tangible link between experiences of the military and conflict and the make-up of local fasci. This shared experience only reinforced bonds among the squadristi and justified their isolation from the outside community. Squadristi who were too young to have fought in the war made up for their lack of service with zeal.Footnote 72
The very ordinary job profiles of the squadristi of the town is striking. They tell us that these men were, on the face of it, respectable members of their communities. They would have enjoyed a great deal of familiarity with their victims. And if they did not know them personally, they were nonetheless locals of the same rural area. It was this closeness between victim and perpetrator that was so crucial to the terror of fascist squads, and that strengthens the argument that fascist violence eroded the ‘thin trust’ that was integral to community life. In the new reality of violence, existing community relations broke down, while new bonds among the perpetrators emerged. Committing acts of violence hardened these bonds and fuelled comradeship between active paramilitaries.Footnote 73 As the unifying features of campanilismo, its mediated conflict and its guidelines for life in the community were torn apart; non-fascist villagers were excluded and were increasingly less able to rely on solidarity based on shared provenance, or to feel at home in the traditionally safe spaces of their villages. The men of the fasci were shattering the framework, and in its place they aimed to impose a new form of life governed by terror.
Of course, those who experienced the contempt of the squadristi or even suffered their wrath were not passive victims. Within the parameters of life under dictatorship, in which one's very existence was ‘policed through violence, fear, and other forms of compulsion’, individuals were still able to make decisions, to react and adapt to what they faced, and to negotiate their way through the context they found themselves in.Footnote 74 This is evident in the countless instances of sporadic resistance across the province of Arezzo: episodes that were often bloody, or simply trivial, and highly localised. The fascio of Strada Casentino recalled that they were once ambushed by angry villagers in the hamlet of Rifiglio, who were lying in wait for their arrival: ‘A mass brawl and pistol gunfight broke out in the quiet mountain settlement’.Footnote 75 Guglielmo Francini of Bucine recalled an outspoken woman of his village (‘di quelle con pochi pelli sulla lingua’ [‘one of those who has few hairs on her tongue/doesn't mince her words’]), who mocked an arrogant, young, and heavily armed fascist for his ‘ridiculous uniform’, asking him ‘who had reduced him to such a state’, and whether he did not think of himself as a ‘complete idiot’.Footnote 76 Fascists too navigated this new world with unique responses. Luigi Pratesi from Ciggiano recalled that a near-deadly road accident involving a truck full of squadristi shook the town's fascio to its core. The shock of the accident continued through time, and a saying was coined in Ciggiano to explain the local group's odd reluctance to use the characteristic vehicle of the paramilitaries: ‘I'm still fascist, but there's no way I'm getting back on to one of those trucks’.Footnote 77 In this case, the squadristi of Ciggiano rejected a key practice of fascist paramilitarism as a result of a shared, village-specific, memory.
Resisting fascist oppression in any form called for rare courage. I contend that these unique instances were linked to the unifying features of rural society, bound in no small part by the framework of campanilismo and the mutual trust it generated. Indeed, all these episodes occurred within the confines of close-knit communities where certain levels of solidarity prevailed, and where inhabitants felt they belonged to a larger group. Aspects of village individuality survived in the face of systematic violence, and to a limited extent rural citizens could draw on community cohesion to challenge, resist or reframe the conventions of fascism in small ways. Ultimately, though, the violence of the squads destroyed the social dynamics of rural communities. It drove wedges between different groups and left fear hanging over the once safe spaces of villages. Coupled to a cultural re-education programme that exalted fascist visions of localism, fascist attempts to conquer the countryside devastated provincial life.
Targeting Key Actors in the Community: The Persecution of Village Priests
Local fascist groups uprooted the established societal structures of campanilismo through violence. Targeting key-actors within communities was crucial to this, and as insiders, squadristi knew who held sway. As Matteo Millan argues, the groups ‘turned the practice of violence into a real skill, which became the base for specific social strategies’.Footnote 78 The persecution of parish priests provides us with powerful evidence of one such social strategy.
In provincial Italy, the duties of the parish priest extended beyond spiritual guidance; from the late nineteenth century, the clergy had carved out a position in rural society as the providers of welfare and performed diverse roles: as educators, mediators and local politicians.Footnote 79 They were as much a part of the landscape of rural Arezzo as the campaniles at the centre of each village. Many parish priests had leveraged their traditional status in rural society for political movements, especially in the first two years after the First World War, when they had demonstrated an impressive ability to rally peasants round the left-leaning social Catholic movement of the Partito popolare italiano (Italian Popular Party). The social and democratic strand that ran through much of the Italian clergy, however, was not represented in the factional and hierarchical nature of the Church itself, whose members were drawn from the entire political spectrum. While some priests built a reputation for their leftist politics, others were famed for exploiting their parishioners. When recalling the parcel of land her family worked on, Dina Brogi remembered that their landowner ‘was a very special master: the priest. We practically belonged to the church. But that did not change anything; my parents still worked like pack animals’.Footnote 80 One way or another, the parish priest held a position of power in his community which was expressed through the relationships he shared with his parishioners. Whether respected or not in a community, the parroco (parish priest) was another feature of village life that brought inhabitants together in a patchwork of interpersonal networks.
Local fascist elites understood the power dynamics in their towns and villages. If they could not count on the support of priests, fascists would persecute them. In part, this related to the anticlericalism of early revolutionary fascism, although this was quickly outweighed by the reactionary objectives of the fascist agrarian elites whose aim was to wipe out peasant unions and local democratic movements. They did not discriminate between peasant leaders based on their faith.Footnote 81 This was about the public fight for power in the local arena. Where priests expressed anti-fascist sentiments, fascists would visibly lock them out of communities, removing them from everyday life altogether. To do so, the fascists turned to the methods they excelled in most: intimidation, humiliation and violence.
Through the pages of Giovinezza, veiled threats responded to the alleged subversive mutterings of parish priests. In the summer of 1922, Giovinezza printed a message to the parroco of Terranuova, after he had been overheard saying that ‘socialists and fascists should be burned alive in the middle of the piazza … the only good party is our party’.Footnote 82 To this, the fascists of Terranuova declared that the times of Giordano Bruno, the heretical philosopher burnt at the stake in Rome in 1600, had passed. If the priest had forgotten any of this, ‘their members would be happy to remind him’.Footnote 83 With its violent undertones, the message conveyed disdain for the authority of the church: the local fascio now had the monopoly on violence. Similarly, in the village of Laterina, Don Dario Maraghini was singled out by the paper for having become too involved in the politics of the municipal council: ‘Don Maraghini who is perhaps too preoccupied with politics; who has always ranted against fascists; who has been too much of a “Don Sturzo” in the issues of our comune, has ended up creating a treacherous environment around himself, and has become scared’.Footnote 84 A repeated fascist refrain when it came to the involvement of priests in local politics was that the church was a place of meditation, while politics was for the piazza.
Fascist action against priests went beyond the written word. In Ambra, local squadristi smeared faeces across the church façade.Footnote 85 In the mountain hamlet of Castelluccio, things escalated even further. During Advent 1923, fascist militia broke into Don Cortellini's home and dragged him away in front of his parishioners. The priest was beaten and forced to march nearly ten miles to the nearest town, where he was reported to the police for subversion.Footnote 86 The attack on Don Cortellini, however, put the provincial movement into a bind. When the archbishop of Arezzo published an open letter to Mussolini, denouncing the treatment of his priest, he provoked a public scandal. To distance the movement from the attack, fascist leaders in Arezzo chalked the incident down to ‘old political grudges’ (read: parochialism, or campanilismo).Footnote 87 The Vatican's Osservatore Romano disputed this claim, arguing that Don Cortellini's case could not be defined as a ‘small local episode’ but was rather an example of premeditated fascist violence. This pushed the fascist hierarchy to pivot from the idea of parochialism and instead label Cortellini as a ‘subversive’, a ‘mediocre priest’, and a ‘terrible Italian’.Footnote 88 Understanding that the excuse of parochialism was no longer convincing, fascist leaders reverted to the political language of the squadristi, undermining the authority of the archbishop and the Church.
The provincial fascist movement of Arezzo aimed to systematically restructure the power dynamics of rural society. A consequence of this was the destruction of the features of campanilismo that bound rural communities together. As traditional reference points like priests or respected municipal councillors were forced out of communities, and as safe spaces dwindled, individuals within small communities were pushed into isolation. With their knowledge of their immediate social environments upturned, and without a wider guiding framework to draw on, villagers became less and less able to depend on one another.
Campanilismo Within and Against the Provincial Fascist Movement
The interplay between fascism and local identity was complex and unclear. As the movement progressively occupied the social and physical space of the province, conflict between fascists inevitably broke out. Sometimes this was related to fascist politics, individual power plays and infighting, known as beghismo. Footnote 89 Sometimes it was linked to village dynamics. What we do know from correspondence between village fasci and the provincial fascist headquarters in Arezzo is that the province was in chaos at least until the mid-1920s. Campanilismo played a part in this chaos; it was given as the main excuse for fascist ill-discipline, insubordination, provincial behaviour and municipal failings. Overwhelmed by the situation in the rural peripheries, the fascist hierarchy enforced strict disciplinary action and transmitted the complaints of local fascist bosses back into the province through local papers. ‘Little ambitions’, ‘reprisals’, ‘local questions’, ‘ferocious egoism’ and ‘flattering demagogy’ were some of the terms used by the provincial fascist hierarchy to vent its frustrations with village fascists in the pages of Giovinezza.Footnote 90 Fascist actors also used campanilismo, which they saw as the main manifestation of ‘backwards’ provincialism, as a discursive tool to develop their own visions of what fascism should be in contrast to what it ostensibly was not. The following examples from fascist reports and letters demonstrate the extent of this situation.
On 12 September 1923, the prefect of Arezzo addressed a plea for intervention to the National Fascist Party (PNF)Footnote 91 headquarters. The prefect had become aware of a local dispute in the northern village of Campogialli between ‘local fascists and a part of the population’, and a local landowner – ‘also fascist’ – who was refusing to give up a stretch of land for a war memorial.
As the disagreement is escalating each day, with evident damage to the prestige of the party and with the danger that it might transcend into an act of reckless violence, given the excessively intemperate character of the rural population, I would consider it appropriate for Your Excellency to intervene.Footnote 92
The prefect's use of the terms ‘excessively intemperate’ and ‘reckless violence’ to characterise the rural population (both fascist and non-fascist) gives us some insight into the psychology of the fascist movement and ruling administration. The prefect related the conflict to a lack of self-restraint. In assigning this trait to the protagonists’ rural origins, he conveyed a common stereotype of the provinces, which fed into a fascist narrative of the need to transform provincial Italians into ‘civilised’ fascists. As civil servants, prefects in Mussolini's coalition government of 1922–24 were not necessarily fascist, although many were sympathisers. Confronted with fascist paramilitarism, even those who were not sympathetic were subordinate to the PNF and its provincial leaders.Footnote 93 Indeed, historian Philip Morgan has demonstrated the ‘chilling complicity of prefects in the erosion of political freedoms’ between 1922 and 1924, which ‘indicated that career state officials could be relied on to do the bidding of the fascist government’.Footnote 94 Biographic information for the prefect of Arezzo in 1923, Enrico Cavalieri, indicates that after his first posting as prefect (Arezzo, 1922–24), he continued in service for the duration of Mussolini's dictatorship, eventually reaching senior rank in the Fascist Blackshirts.Footnote 95 This suggests a successful career founded on a long-standing commitment to fascist rule.
High-ranking officials were not the only ones to make disparaging characterisations of the local population; these often came from locals themselves. In 1926, a frustrated doctor from Caprese Michelangelo wrote a long letter of complaint to the province's fascist federal secretary in Arezzo. The doctor had taken issue with the fascists in the neighbouring town, Pieve Santo Stefano, who due to ‘parochial’ differences, were blocking his efforts to set up an independent fascio in Caprese Michelangelo. As a result, the ‘67 dedicated fascists’ of Caprese Michelangelo had nowhere to organise themselves, giving free reign to ‘the old plucked popolari who still continue to spread subversive propaganda … among the simple people’.Footnote 96 Alongside his frustration at the parochialism of his neighbouring fascists, the doctor's description of his own townspeople as ‘simple’ and as easily led astray by elderly Christian leftists is telling of his mindset. The doctor looked down on his compatriots and believed that fascism embodied superior values around which national unity could take root among a generally uneducated population, if only he could break past the obstacle of the uncivilised fascists in the neighbouring town. The doctor tied this perceived dysfunction of local fascism to campanilismo, emphasising the drawbacks of the local character. His purpose was to convey a classist self-perception of superiority and to gain traction in the local fascist movement.
A common complaint among provincial fascist leaders was that their men did not understand what fascism was, and thus did not know how to behave as fascists. This was so for the disbanded fascio of Cavriglia, whose band members had disgraced the village, as related in the introduction. Similarly, the mayor of Marciano in southern Arezzo stoked controversy when, in January 1925, he used Giovinezza to rail against ‘the misunderstanding of fascism by many of its members’.Footnote 97 This was not unique to Arezzo, or even Tuscany. In 1925, the intransigent leader of the PNF, Roberto Farinacci, launched a tirade against the calamitous ill-discipline of provincial fascism throughout Italy: ‘I am banning, therefore, the numerous local questions, the stomach-churning dissidence that has caused so much damage to our party, I am banning the ambitious and the profiteers, I am banning any spirit of indiscipline’.Footnote 98 Whether these issues were locally sourced, or the result of fascist insubordination, the fascist hierarchy invariably put them down to the provincial character of local fascists. Fascist leaders claimed that the weight given to local issues prevented small-town fascists from seeing the national picture or from acting as fascists should. In many cases local movements reacted badly to this charge, and to the measures taken to centralise peripheral groups. One mutinous letter from the fascists of Ambra and Bucine, for example, complained about the new leader who had been imposed on them from above, remarking that ‘we do not want leaders who do not have fascist faith and much less do we want people from outside getting mixed up in our business’.Footnote 99
The lack of fascist discipline in rural communities continued far into the 1920s and was a running theme for officials sent from Arezzo into the wild countryside to enact the ideals of the regime. In 1928, a letter from the leader of the fascio of the tiny village of Pozzo della Chiana to Arezzo gave an unwittingly satirical description of the local fascist movement, demonstrating just how little the town's fascists respected him.
It is with true regret that I must note that the fascists in Pozzo della Chiana are undisciplined and do not have even the slightest principles of education or common sense. Called to gatherings, they do not turn up, reprimanded, they do not listen, commanded, they make up absurd excuses. This situation must come to an end because the fascist must be disciplined, conscious and must have only one purpose … to serve the fascist cause at the cost of any sacrifice.Footnote 100
This was not the first time that a fascist officer had complained about Pozzo della Chiana and its lack of fascist principles. A year earlier, the then leader of the village fascio had been shocked to discover that one of the community's valued civil associations, la croce bianca (the White Cross), was being run by a mixture of ex-socialists, communists and ‘renegade fascists’. He immediately reported this to Arezzo and managed to get the association disbanded.Footnote 101 Certain forms of village cooperation transcended national politics. Associations such as this, or village choirs, orchestras, or fire services were places of ‘local sociability, solidarity, and recognition’, not easily substituted by new fascist politics, especially where national fascist values had not found a strong foothold.Footnote 102
If campanilismo was allegedly to blame for a lack of discipline within the fasci, it also remained a problem for local governance in the late 1920s. In April of 1928, a podestà expressed his dismay with the fascists of Civitella della Chiana.Footnote 103 Still raw about its failed separatist efforts, the village had isolated itself, while its fascio stubbornly refused to attend municipal events in the neighbouring town of Badia al Pino, instead holding alternative events within the walls of their medieval hilltop settlement. The podestà claimed that the village fascio was ‘rebelling against the authority invested in me’ and was using ‘the ancient feeling of campanilismo in the village’ to disrupt his plans.Footnote 104 Civitella della Chiana, he claimed, was the last bastion of such campanilismo, as he had successfully rooted out all other parochial disputes in the municipality.
All these examples show a disarticulation between local fascist organisations and the established political values of the national fascist movement. In the province of Arezzo, chaos, feuding, and violent disputes characterised peripheral fascist organisations from the outset and well into the 1920s. In Arezzo, wherever local fascist groups antagonised the provincial hierarchy or pushed the boundaries of condoned fascist behaviour, their actions were put down to stereotypes of local character and their ignorance of true fascism, all of which was said to be lodged in a broader and pernicious culture of campanilismo. Instead of being recognised as a guiding framework to rural society, the provincial fascist movement blamed campanilismo for the chaos of ill-disciplined fascist movements. This misreading cemented the regime's failure to penetrate the towns and villages of rural Italy. By empowering a certain class of men with weapons and a licence to commit atrocities during a time of political and social upheaval, fascism destroyed the very web of trust that held provincial communities together. In doing this, the provincial fascist movement generated destabilising violence and local power vacuums. With the traditional frameworks of local life torn apart, ordinary citizens had to negotiate their way through new power dynamics and a violent reality.
Conclusion
The people of rural Arezzo were intimately connected to the physical space that surrounded them. The very definition of campanilismo attests to this connection, as do villagers’ nicknames for each other, closely linked as they were to the physical and social conditions of the land. By shifting the analysis away from the nation-building features of provincial culture and focusing, instead, on its guiding social structures, we gain insight into how ‘ordinary’ rural citizens interacted with and imagined the places where they lived. Moreover, connecting physical space to social organisation helps us to define the power relationships and the social bonds that existed across communities.Footnote 105 Looking at how and where these long-standing features of community life resisted, transformed, or broke under the strain of fascism is key to developing a nuanced picture of the ‘lived experiences’ of ordinary citizens from below during fascist regimes. This is a versatile framework that can complement scholarship on everyday life under dictatorship – for example, work on Francoist Spain that looks at how the regime reconfigured communal space as a repressive measure, or work on fascist Italy that analyses the practices that shaped and were shaped by local spaces, such as taverns, during the regime.Footnote 106 The eruption of fascism in rural Arezzo was so impactful precisely because it occurred in the functional and intimate spaces of rural society that were intrinsic to village networks and social cohesion. Fascist action desecrated these spaces, and in turn uprooted existing interpersonal networks and established new power dynamics, thereby forcing local citizens to navigate a new reality.
In the void created by fascist paramilitary action, provincial elites began to jostle for position, bringing long-standing local issues to the fore. The added tension and pressures of fascist violence aggravated conflict among fascists in the local space. For the regime, however, it was not this fascist violence but rather the parochial dynamics in the provinces that hindered the national fascist project. It viewed campanilismo as a subversive force: as an innate provincialism of rural Italians that was embedded in the structures of municipal councils and local fasci. From this perspective, the movement was able to blame campanilismo for its own shortcomings – or, conversely, use the idea of campanilismo as a discursive strategy to impose different visions of what fascism should look like. In fact, in the case of Arezzo, it was the innate violence of the fascist movement that made the successful and long-lasting fascist conquest and re-education of the province impossible.
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank the archivists at the Archvio di Stato di Arezzo, at the municipality of Civitella della Chiana, and at the Archivio Diaristico Nazionale of Pieve Santo Stefano for their generous support. This article is from a chapter of my PhD thesis at the European University Institute. I owe a great thank you to all my friends and colleagues there who took the time to read various versions of it and to give me their excellent feedback. In particular, my PhD supervisor, Lucy Riall, and my second reader, Pieter Judson. Thank you also to Dominique Riell for your feedback and for encouraging me to submit to Contemporary European History, and to Emile Chabal for your excellent advice as journal editor. Lastly, I would also like to thank the three anonymous reviewers for their sharp and constructive readings. All translations are my own.
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