Father and Son

Abstract

The explanation of Benito Mussolini’s wild story is to be found, first, in the regional and family roots from which he came, then in the ideas that influenced him, and most broadly in the political, social, and economic crucible that was Italy’s history—and in his own internal demons. Mussolini himself recognized the influence of his early environment on his later development. In the 1920s, when he was the Duce of Fascism and dictator of Italy, he manipulated the image of his parents to feed his own mythology. The Fascist propaganda machine imbued the memory of his mother with saint-like status, and in his Autobiography, ghostwritten by his brother Arnaldo, he is quoted as saying, “My greatest love was for my mother. She was so quiet, so tender, and yet so strong. Her name was Rosa.” Mussolini’s assessment of his father Alessandro, who, because of his radical politics was all but forgotten during the Fascist regime, was more accurate: “If my father had been another kind of man, I would have turned out entirely different.”¹

†The late Philip Cannistraro was a noted historian of fascism. This chapter was put together using his notes.

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The explanation of Benito Mussolini’s wild story is to be found, first, in the regional and family roots from which he came, then in the ideas that influenced him, and most broadly in the political, social, and economic crucible that was Italy’s history—and in his own internal demons. Mussolini himself recognized the influence of his early environment on his later development. In the 1920s, when he was the Duce of Fascism and dictator of Italy, he manipulated the image of his parents to feed his own mythology. The Fascist propaganda machine imbued the memory of his mother with saint-like status, and in his Autobiography, ghostwritten by his brother Arnaldo, he is quoted as saying, “My greatest love was for my mother. She was so quiet, so tender, and yet so strong. Her name was Rosa.” Mussolini’s assessment of his father Alessandro, who, because of his radical politics was all but forgotten during the Fascist regime, was more accurate: “If my father had been another kind of man, I would have turned out entirely different.” ¹

Mussolini deeply admired his father and grew up much more closely bound to Alessandro’s world of rebellious political militancy than to his mother’s conservative lower-middle-class aspirations. Much about Mussolini’s adult character lay buried in the dynamics of the tension-filled relationship between Alessandro Mussolini and Rosa Maltoni, and in the clash of their conflicting values.

For 30 years, from 1877 to 1908, Alessandro Mussolini labored as the blacksmith of Dovia, a rural village of several hundred people. The surrounding commune of Predappio lay in the province of Forlì, a district in Italy’s Romagna region. Situated at the easternmost reaches of the Po Valley, between the Apennines and the Adriatic Sea, the Romagna was a land of extremes. Its people were at once generous and harsh, oppressed and violent, poor and hardworking. In the low inland plains of the Romagna, the soil was darkly rich and productive, with agricultural estates run by capitalist managers who exploited the labor of the braccianti, the impoverished seasonal migrant workers. In the higher areas further east, where the Mussolinis made their home, parched, rocky hills and sunbaked volcanic slopes gave the region a barren look—“a dreary landscape,” Mussolini later recalled. ² Here, where the braccianti were less numerous, the countryside was dotted with small farms rented by sharecroppers or owned by poor but independent peasant proprietors.

Alessandro Mussolini was born in the small hamlet of Predappio in 1854, six years before Italy became a nation. His ancestors had been subjects of the pope for generations, and his own father, Luigi, had been in a papal prison. Luigi had owned small plots of land but had fallen on hard times and in his youth had been something of a rebel.

Mussolini later described Alessandro—not without some inaccuracies—in a memoir he wrote while in prison:

When barely ten he was sent to the nearby village of Dovadola as an apprentice to an ironsmith. From Dovadola he moved to Meldola, where between 1875 and 1880 he became acquainted with the ideas of the [anarchist and socialist] Internationalists. Later, having mastered his craft, he opened a shop in Dovia. This village … did not have a good reputation. Its people were quarrelsome. My father found work there and began to spread the ideas of the International. He founded a local branch which had many members but which later was closed down by a police raid. He was twenty-six years old when he met my mother. ³

Alessandro learned to read at home, after which he went to elementary school in Predappio until the end of the third grade. He was then apprenticed to a blacksmith, taking evening classes while learning his craft during the day. ⁴ Alessandro was essentially an autodidact, whose education came through reading. He devoured the literature of social protest, especially Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables, Emile Zola’s novels, Alessandro Manzoni’s poems, and Giuseppe Mazzini’s The Duties of Man. ⁵ Early in 1868, when Alessandro returned to Predappio after a six-month apprenticeship in Dovadola, he discovered and became a regular reader of the Romagna’s many radical newspapers. ⁶

While the books he read helped form Alessandro’s social conscience, the poverty and social injustice everywhere around him turned him into a political militant. The people of the Romagna had long embraced forms of radical politics, including the Jacobinism of the French Revolution in the 1790s, the conspiratorial uprisings of the Carbonari against despotic monarchs in the early 1800s, and more recently, the patriotic republicanism of Mazzinian revolution. Mazzini had been one of the principal exponents of Italian unification. ⁷ His conspiracies had been aimed at overthrowing the monarchs of Italy and replacing them with a single, democratically based republic. Although he did help to instill a sense of national identity in many Italians, he was deeply disappointed in the way Italy had been unified—through the military conquests of Piedmont’s House of Savoy and the political–diplomatic machinations of the chief Savoyan minister, Camillo Cavour. In the years after unification, Mazzini continued to try to arouse a revolutionary spirit in Italy and advocated populist ideas. But he did not want to see a genuine social revolution in which private property would be seized as a result of class warfare. It was for this reason that in 1871 Mazzini bitterly condemned the bloodshed and radicalism of the Paris Commune uprising, a position that cost him many followers and gave impetus to the incipient Internationalist movement.

In the years when Alessandro was in his teens and twenties, the difficult social conditions in the Romagna worsened as a result of a general agricultural crisis that impoverished many peasants. The poor rural economy made the Romagna a center of anarchism and socialism, for these doctrines promised to end exploitation and bring about the common ownership of property. The refugee Russian anarchist Mikhail Bakunin developed a committed following among the peasants of the region after his arrival in Italy in 1864. ⁸ Bakunin’s anarchist doctrines propounded the efficacy of violent revolution through popular uprising of the people. The masses were already infused with the spirit of revolt but needed the guidance of revolutionary militants driven by a single-minded faith in the libertarian ideal. Bakunin proposed the expropriation of capitalist property and its transfer into the collective hands of the people—land to the peasants and the means of production to the workers. He was convinced, moreover, that the state—even a worker state—was a repressive mechanism that had to be abolished.

In the same year that Bakunin settled in Italy, Karl Marx founded the first International Workingmen’s Association in London, and he and Bakunin vied for the loyalties of Italians for years to come. In 1872, Marx engineered Bakunin’s ouster from the International, for Bakunin had rejected Marx’s authoritarian doctrines.

But in the Romagna, as elsewhere in Italy, Bakunin’s anarchist doctrines held sway and won Alessandro Mussolini’s heart and mind. Bakunin’s revolutionary ideals sparked a series of unsuccessful uprisings during the decade that were fiercely suppressed by the Italian government.

Alessandro first entered the local political struggle in May 1872, when he gave a speech in the main square of Predappio commemorating a socialist worker killed by republican rivals. That August, just before he turned 18, he moved to nearby Meldola, where he found work in the blacksmith shop of a political idealist who had fought under Giuseppe Garibaldi. Here Alessandro became organizationally active. Bakunin’s followers had just formed the Italian Federation of the International, a rival organization to Marx’s group, and when anarchist Andrea Costa started a regional chapter in the Romagna in 1874, Alessandro joined. That summer, during the anarchist insurrection led by Bakunin to precipitate revolution, Alessandro led a group of some 50 men toward Bologna before the police halted them. ⁹

Many Romagnoli radicals, especially autodidacts with little theoretical sophistication like Alessandro, never formed clear-cut ideas that set them exclusively in either the anarchist or the socialist camp. Bakunin died in 1876, and the dominant figure in Romagna radicalism thereafter was Andrea Costa, a handsome and charismatic leader who commanded a powerful personal following that transcended the Bakunin–Marx split. ¹⁰ Costa’s personal trajectory, which led him away from a purely anarchist position toward socialism, exemplified the fluid ideological situation in the Romagna. Alessandro Mussolini joined forces with Costa in 1876 at an Internationalist meeting in Bologna, where he represented the radicals of Meldola and Predappio. The two men became fast friends ¹¹ and Alessandro began a correspondence with Costa and other Internationalists, including Amilcare Cipriani, a veteran of the Paris Commune uprising of 1871. Little in the way of Marxist literature was directly available in Italy at the time—anarchist Carlo Cafiero published a popular commentary on Marx’s Das Kapital in 1879, but anarchist Pietro Gori’s translation of The Communist Manifesto appeared only in 1891. ¹² Alessandro, who read only Italian, got his limited knowledge of Marxian socialism from these translations as well as from newspapers, pamphlets, and through his correspondence. Further complicating the political scene was the strong republican presence in the region, for in the Romagna, the anti-monarchist followers of Mazzini were intransigent and often prone to violent tactics. Despite these sectarian divisions, at times anarchists and republicans, at other times socialists and republicans, made common cause on particular issues.

In 1877, after his release from prison for his role in the Bologna insurrection, Costa went to Switzerland, where he met a young Russian woman named Anna Kuliscioff. ¹³ Beautiful, blond-haired Kuliscioff possessed a brilliant mind and, like Costa, was an impassioned anarchist. She had become a radical while studying engineering in Zurich, and was now an exile from Tsarist Russia. They remained ardent lovers until 1885, during which Kuliscioff gave birth to a daughter, Andreina. She soon converted to Marxism, and her persuasive intellect no doubt influenced Costa in the same direction.

In the summer of 1879, Costa dropped a bombshell by issuing an open letter “To my friends in the Romagna,” announcing the need to abandon the idea of violent revolution and to embrace a legalitarian socialist posture that involved peaceful political action through the electoral system and by running for public office. “We worry more about the logic of our ideas and the content of our revolutionary program,” complained Costa, “than studying the economic and moral condition of the people and their immediate needs.” ¹⁴ Alessandro agreed with this sentiment and, like Costa, would later take part in electoral politics, but he remained committed to direct action for many years to come. The ideological flexibility of the region’s activists led Alessandro to contribute articles to both socialist and republican newspapers and, on the heels of Costa’s “conversion,” led him to declare that despite differences about tactics, all true “socialists” saw revolution as the means and anarchism as the end of their struggle. ¹⁵

Alessandro’s understanding of socialism derived from his passion for social justice and his day-to-day association with the struggles of workers and peasants for a better life. In his mind, the monarchy, the Catholic church, and the landowners were the enemies of the people. In an article entitled “What is socialism?,” he explained his simple position: “Socialism, we answer, is the open, violent, moral rebellion against the inhuman order of things as now constituted. It is the science and excelsior that illuminate the world. It is reason that wins out over faith. It is free thought that rebels against prejudice. It is free love that takes the place of a legal contract. It is a freely made pact among all human beings to live a truly civil life. It is true justice that reigns supreme on earth”. ¹⁶

Whether it was as an anarchist or a socialist, to be a political rebel like Alessandro Mussolini in Italy in the last decades of the nineteenth century was dangerous. During Alessandro’s adult years, Italy seethed with instability. In the 1870s, when revolts erupted in central and southern Italy, the government saw the anarchists as the greatest danger to the social order and imposed a wave of reaction on the subversives that lasted until the beginning of the new century and that struck anarchists and socialists alike. Laws intended to destroy revolutionary movements branded all radicals as criminals and confiscated their newspapers, and the government closed down their cells and meted out stiff jail sentences to anyone engaged in activity deemed dangerous to “public safety.” Many sought refuge in exile abroad, especially in Switzerland, France, or the USA. Alessandro’s fate was typical of his generation of what the state called “subversives.” Despite his doctrinal flexibility, he was clearly a committed revolutionary. In November 1878, he organized a rally of braccianti in the face of a police order forbidding the meeting. In retaliation, the police raided his shop, which had become the local radical headquarters, and found a stash of pamphlets by Bakunin and letters from Costa and Cafiero. Alessandro was sentenced to six months in prison. On his release, the government placed him under a formal sentence of police surveillance for four years, requiring him to keep a regular reporting schedule to the local authorities. ¹⁷

Alessandro’s politics made his personal life difficult. After having finished his apprenticeship in Meldola in the fall of 1877, Alessandro had moved back to Dovia, where he opened his own blacksmith shop. At about the same time there arrived in town a 19-year-old woman named Rosa Maltoni, who had just been appointed as Dovia’s first elementary school teacher—a new law had just made elementary education compulsory for the first time. Rosa was an attractive woman of serious character, born in the nearby village of San Martino in Strada in 1858. She had studied in Forlì and earned a diploma qualifying her to teach the early grades of elementary school. Black-haired and stocky, she had basic good looks but a square jaw that her first son would inherit. Rosa had moved to Dovia with her father, Giuseppe, a retired veterinarian, and her mother, Marianna Ghetti. The Maltonis, who owned a small parcel of acreage that would later pass to Rosa, were somewhat more comfortable than the Mussolinis and had modest pretensions to lower-middle-class status. Despite the strong tradition of anti-clericalism in the Romagna, the family was devoutly Catholic, and this religious belief gave Rosa’s life meaning. Her greatest, indeed, perhaps her only, self-indulgence was the pilgrimage she made to the sanctuary of the Virgin of Loreto after the birth of her children. ¹⁸

The young teacher’s position gave her a certain status in the village, where she became the center of attention. ¹⁹ The 24-year-old Alessandro, by all accounts a muscular, good-looking man with blue eyes, black hair, and a large mustache, took a fancy to Rosa, who had seemed oblivious to the attentions until he managed to slip a letter to her in the composition book of a young pupil. ²⁰ Alessandro eventually proposed. Rosa agreed but her parents objected strenuously to his revolutionary politics and his constant brush with the authorities, to say nothing of the young atheist’s priest baiting. Complicating matters was Rosa’s professional success, for her reputation as a dedicated teacher came to the attention of her superiors, who offered her what must have been a rare opportunity for a rural schoolmistress—she could move to the provincial capital of Forlì and teach at a better school, while also taking courses at the local university on a scholarship. The chance to live in a real city and to advance her career appealed to her greatly, and the decision to turn down the offer caused her much inner anguish. But love won out. While telling her superiors that she could not abandon or uproot her elderly parents, she kept to herself the fact that she had fallen in love with Alessandro Mussolini. ²¹

It took four years of courtship and Alessandro’s promise to abandon politics in favor of blacksmithing before the Maltonis gave their consent to the match. The couple was married in a religious ceremony—the devout Rosa and her family insisted on it, much to Alessandro’s dismay—in January 1882. Some months later, after the police surveillance had been canceled, a civil ceremony followed. ²² Alessandro’s atheism and anti-clericalism would remain a source of tension in the family and a cause of personal distress for Rosa. ²³ For despite his promises to the contrary, Alessandro refused to abandon his political convictions. Only a few months after his marriage, he returned to the fray by campaigning on behalf of Costa, who was seeking election to the Chamber of Deputies. Costa won, becoming the first socialist in Parliament. ²⁴

Rosa’s schoolhouse was a run-down stone building located at a spot called Varano dei Costa, a small hill overlooking Dovia. At first, the couple lived on the ground floor of the building, with classes held in an adjoining room. A year later, when Rosa became pregnant, Alessandro installed his blacksmith shop on the ground floor and the couple moved living quarters and the classroom upstairs, both of which were entered from the same outside staircase. Symbolizing the division between husband and wife were the portraits hung on their walls, one of Garibaldi and the other a picture of the Madonna of Pompei. ²⁵

Rosa gave birth to their first child on July 29, 1883, a sweltering Sunday afternoon, at 2:45 P.M. “Eight days earlier,” Mussolini would later write about his own birth, “the sun had entered the constellation of Leo.” ²⁶ Rosa insisted on baptizing the boy, and Alessandro on naming him Benito Amilcare Andrea—all in honor of three political heroes, the Mexican revolutionary Benito Juarez, Amilcare Cipriani, and Andrea Costa. Eventually, the Mussolinis had two other children. A second son, Arnaldo (named after Arnaldo of Brescia, a twelfth-century heretic), was born in 1885, followed by a daughter, Edvige, in 1888.

While Rosa continued to teach and shoulder the burdens of a growing family, Alessandro threw himself back into politics. A year after Benito’s birth, Alessandro headed a local delegation to a socialist congress, where he led an anarchist faction against Costa’s increasingly moderate position. Costa’s personal pleading, however, persuaded Alessandro to compromise, ²⁷ and over the next several years, he came to accept the idea that control of public office could result in tangible benefits for the peasants and workers. He worked hard to organize the local peasantry and the braccianti, never losing his passion for social justice or his belief in the cause of working class unity. In 1889, he took part in a rally to commemorate the anniversary of the Commune, in his words, “the glorious Parisian revolution of 1871.” ²⁸ That same year, he and 14 workers won election to the communal council of Predappio. Over the next several years, Alessandro sponsored a cooperative for braccianti that purchased two steam-powered threshing machines; he also pressed for a subsidized medical program for workers, traveling libraries in rural areas, and other socially progressive programs. His greatest pleasure may have been getting the local school board to put pictures of Garibaldi in classrooms. Alessandro remained on the Predappio council until the socialists were swept out of office in 1896, but he was elected again in 1899. ²⁹

Alessandro enjoyed a great deal of local prominence as a result of his political activity, and the articles and letters he wrote for socialist and republican newspapers—articles not always grammatically perfect but eloquent in their simplicity—earned him a certain status. Widely recognized as “the father of Predappio socialism,” ³⁰ he had a reputation as the champion of common workers and peasants against the economic and political establishment. He also fought for the rank and file within the socialist movement itself. When socialist leaders decided in 1890 to hold their congress in Lugano that year, Alessandro condemned the decision in a powerfully worded letter to the newspaper La Lotta, accusing the leadership of making it impossible for the workers themselves to get to Switzerland. Socialism, he railed, was a matter for the masses, not a select few. ³¹

Benito Mussolini did not grow up in a tranquil household. Alessandro’s political activity may have won him respect among the peasantry, but it caused serious problems at home. During the Fascist regime, the biographers who wrote about Mussolini and his parents were discreet and did not discuss the family tensions directly, but there is clear evidence that the Mussolini home was anything but happy. The chief source of the discord was Alessandro’s complete lack of concern for money and Rosa’s constant though justifiable recriminations that the support of the family depended entirely on her. Her aspirations for a comfortable, respectable life were shattered by Alessandro’s radicalism. Rosa, whom one contemporary source called “parsimonious,” ³² reminded her husband repeatedly that, contrary to the promise he had made on their marriage, he entirely ignored his blacksmith business, spending all his time instead at political meetings or traveling throughout the countryside organizing peasants and giving speeches. Because of Alessandro’s politics, some parents withdrew their children from Rosa’s class. To make matters worse, Alessandro’s good-hearted nature led him to give what little money he had to the less fortunate and even fall into debt helping unemployed workers. When Rosa inherited her parents’ property, Alessandro sold it and gave away the proceeds. He was, Benito later agreed, “excessively altruistic.” As a result, in addition to rearing their children and teaching school, Rosa was forced to spend the early and late hours of each day spinning flax and weaving at a loom, the products of which she bartered to peasants for sacks of flour and other foodstuffs. ³³ In the meantime, Alessandro was frequently heard shouting his opinions, but this was always about politics and never about matters of home life. ³⁴

Growing up in such a strained household, Benito could hardly fail to be pulled in opposite directions, and the contradictory values to which he was exposed impacted on his childhood consciousness as well as on his adult development. Emotionally and spiritually he was closer to his father, yearning to emulate his libertarian life. At the same time, as he withdrew from his mother’s seriousness and her pessimism while absorbing her resentments, he rebelled against her emphasis on religion as a moral compass and on discipline as a means to self-improvement. “My mother,” he confessed to a friend, “had wanted me to be educated in the bosom of the Holy Roman church. But my father understood everything about me.” Yet if Alessandro’s ideals drew him to the working class, his mother’s lower-middle-class aspirations pushed him away from his father’s ideas—indeed, as he matured, he would come to see his future not as a laborer but as an intellectual, and he developed in himself what he later scorned as the “bourgeois I,” the preoccupation with the self rather than with others. ³⁵

As a child, Mussolini knew bleak circumstances—a family economy close to the edge of poverty, a rural setting marked by a grim isolation and limited horizons, and, as one biographer has written, an “atmosphere of frustration and envy.” ³⁶ These circumstances were not exceptional for children of the same background and region; what would prove unusual were the drive and the experience that would lead Benito to transcend his environment.

In June 1884, before Benito was a year old, school officials moved his mother’s elementary class and the family to new quarters in a large but deteriorating three-story building known as Palazzo Varano. Benito remembered his new home as “austere and melancholy.” The family lived on the second floor, and to get to their rooms, they had to walk through the classroom.

The living quarters contained two adjoining spaces, one a kitchen with a fireplace, the other a bedroom. Privacy was virtually unknown. After the other children were born, Benito and Arnaldo slept together in a large bed in the kitchen and Edvige in her parents’ bedroom. Later, Rosa’s widowed mother also squeezed into the already tight quarters. From the window next to his bed, Benito could see the Rabbi River, the hills, and at night the moon. The kitchen furniture consisted of an armoire and large trunk, and in the center of the room a table served as both dining surface and desk. Near the window stood a bookcase filled with old books and newspapers, and one day, Benito happened on a discovery among the shelves that filled him with surprise and emotion—a packet of Alessandro’s love letters to Rosa. “I read some of them,” he later confessed.

Life was simple in the Mussolini household. Mattresses were rough cotton shells filled with corn leaves. Lunch each day, prepared in the open fireplace, consisted of vegetable soup and dinner of chicory gathered from the fields and eaten from a common platter; on Sundays, mutton broth broke the monotony. Grapes from a small rented plot of vines provided wine for home consumption. ³⁷

“There was great misery all around us,” Mussolini remembered, and one of the early images that remained fixed in his mind was the sight of poor families, bent under sacks containing their meager belongings, who continuously left Dovia and surrounding towns and emigrated to South America. Benito’s father wrote articles about the emigration of local peasants who undertook the journey “to unknown lands to see if in the new world the honest labor of their limbs could earn them the scraps of bread that in … bourgeois Italy are denied to poor workers.” Alessandro believed that the trauma of emigration could be prevented if only the uncultivated fields or those in marshy terrain were made arable and given to peasants. ³⁸

Belying his later reputation as a powerful orator, Benito seemed unable to utter a comprehensible word for his first three years, a fact that troubled his parents greatly until a doctor in Forlì assured his grandmother, “Don’t worry, he will speak, he will speak; I think, in fact, that he will speak too much.” ³⁹ When he did begin to talk, he was able to do so both in Italian as well as in Romagnol dialect, for Rosa insisted that the family use proper Italian at home. ⁴⁰

As a young boy, Benito developed a circle of companions his own age, but frequently cowed them by his aggressive and impetuous nature. Having a marked tendency toward violence, he imposed his leadership by force over a band of mischievous followers. Thanks to his incessant brawling, he was constantly scuffed and bloodied. As the older brother, Benito alternately bullied and protected his younger one, who grew to be a “quiet, rather fat little boy somewhat short-sighted, unassuming.” ⁴¹ One childhood companion recalled that Benito “never discussed things, he just hit!” At times, he seemed to enjoy fighting for its own sake. “I was a ceaseless and brutal rogue,” he admitted. “Many a time I returned home with my head injured by a stone. But I knew how to avenge myself.” ⁴²

If from life in the fields Benito learned the uses of physical force, the lessons were sometimes reinforced at home. Though a decent father, Alessandro was a fairly typical Italian country parent who disciplined his chronically mischievous son with physical punishment. When the boy’s concentration wandered while pumping the bellows in the blacksmith shop, or if he winced as sparks flew from the anvil, his attention would be recalled by a smack on the back of the head. And when Benito committed more serious infractions—as when he was expelled from school—he felt the sting of his father’s strap. Nonetheless, such acts of discipline do not seem to have diminished Benito’s affection for his father, and it was Rosa who stood out in his memory as the stern authoritarian. Alarmed by Benito’s fractious temperament, Rosa drew closer to her second child, Arnaldo. ⁴³

Nor could his mother instill in her first son the religious belief and respect for the church that was the sustaining force of her life. She and her mother took Benito to mass each Sunday but he was so unruly that she would insist on his remaining outside the church so as not to disturb the other parishioners. “I was unable,” he recalled, “to remain very long in church, especially during the longer ceremonies. The red light of the candles, the penetrating smell of the incense, the colors of the sacred vestments, the drawling singing of the faithful, and the sound of the organ, all disturbed me deeply.” In this, too, Benito followed his father’s example, and developed a strong antipathy to priests and organized religion. ⁴⁴

After he began attending school, Benito experienced much of his leisure time in isolation, sullen, introverted, and restless. In the summers, he spent hours on lonely walks in the fields or sitting alone in the hills watching birds and daydreaming. From an early age, Mussolini preferred to read books both to satisfy his natural curiosity and as a substitute for personal relationships. Rosa taught him the alphabet at the age of four and by the time he was five, he could read with ease. Reading was the most important—indeed, the only—way in which a young boy living in the isolated provinces of Italy could expand his intellectual horizons and gather a sense of the wider world around him. Reading made Mussolini broadly conversant with the culture and ideas circulating in the Italy of his youth, and had much to do with shaping the direction of his early life. He bought, read, and kept books all his life, even when in later years he was preoccupied with affairs of state. ⁴⁵

The first book to affect Benito’s sensibilities was Hugo’s Les Misérables, the moving tale of social injustice much praised by early socialists. A copy of the book in Italian translation, probably one owned by Alessandro Mussolini, who had read and admired it, was read aloud to the townsfolk of Dovia when they gathered in a cowshed on winter evenings. The dramatic story of the unjustly persecuted Jean Valjean appealed to the young boy’s nascent social consciousness. The other work with which he became familiar early on was Dante’s Divine Comedy, and he remembered the powerful impression it made on him when he first saw the famous edition illustrated by Gustave Doré in the home of a classmate. In school, Mussolini learned passages of the great medieval work of allegory by heart and would sprinkle his early writings with allusions and quotations from Dante. At the kitchen table, Benito read the other volumes that were in the Mussolini household, including the poems of Alessandro Manzoni, and especially the widely circulated works of Roberto Ardigò and Francesco Fiorentino, two Italian popularizers of philosophy whose books were much in vogue at the time. ⁴⁶

Ardigò’s influence on Mussolini, as on other Italian socialists of the period, was deeply felt. Like nineteenth-century positivist philosophers, who believed that the observable data of sense experience constitute the only basis for truth, he presented in La morale dei positivisti, a linear theory of progress—all things, he argued, were in a constant state of progressive evolution to higher forms, and human history worked in a parallel fashion. In his system, history could be seen as an uninterrupted chain of links (“events”), each predetermined by its predecessor. Ardigò’s mechanistic notion of history had much to do with Mussolini’s adult understanding of “destiny,” for he always found it difficult to reconcile this sense of historical fatalism with his revolutionary principles—and this conflict was at the core of his belief that his own life was a continual struggle between “fatality” and “will.” ⁴⁷

Benito’s early introduction to socialist doctrine came from his father’s political pamphlets, Marxist tracts, and radical newspapers. Mussolini’s formal education began in his mother’s classroom, which he attended from the ages of six to eight. He then walked the two miles to Predappio for a year to attend a class taught by Silvio Marani, a socialist friend of Alessandro. Under ordinary circumstances, Benito’s education might well have ended there, and his father would have gladly trained him in the art of blacksmithing. But Rosa’s burning ambition was to see to a good education for her children, one that would allow them to rise above the social status of her proletarian-artisan husband. Rosa felt that a well-structured school regimen would cure her unruly son of his misbehaving ways, but she hoped secretly that boarding away from home would free him from the socialist influences of her husband. ⁴⁸ Much against Alessandro’s judgment, she decided to send Benito to a religious boarding school in Faenza, about 20 miles away. The school, run by Salesian monks, had been recommended by a wealthy acquaintance and promised not only to give the boy a decent education but also to teach him discipline and religious piety.

In January 1891, the year before he went off to Faenza, Benito accompanied his father to Milan, where Alessandro purchased a threshing machine on behalf of the agricultural cooperative in Predappio. The bustling industrial city must have appeared overwhelming to the provincial boy of eight, and years later, he still remembered the Piazza del Duomo covered in snow. Alessandro took him to a number of meetings with socialist leaders, who had made Milan the unofficial capital of the Italian socialist movement. ⁴⁹

Benito dreaded the prospect of leaving home, and during the summer of 1892, he misbehaved even more blatantly than usual, so that when he left for Faenza in October it was with a bandaged hand injured in a fight. Alessandro drove his son to school in a donkey-drawn cart. When he turned to leave at the school gates, Benito burst into tears. ⁵⁰

The two years that Benito spent in the Salesian school were the most difficult of his early life. He was immediately struck by the class distinctions imposed on the students, who were divided into groups according to the economic status of their parents. Much to his embarrassment, Benito had to take his meals with the poorest, which made up the majority of the 200 students at the school. This was his first real lesson in social discrimination. According to his own account of these bleak years, the discipline enforced by the monks bordered on cruelty. The pupils were awakened before sunrise, had to wash in cold water, and were compelled to attend mass every morning before breakfast. Meals were eaten in silence. The food was meager and often bad, especially for the poorer students. Lessons began and ended in prayer. He remembered the headmaster as an incredibly thin man whose appearance frightened him, especially as every student had to kiss his hand at the end of the day. Sunday walks and a daily period of recreation were the only break in the monotonous regimen. Disobedience resulted in beatings and other forms of punishment.

When Benito developed swollen feet because of the damp cold, he was refused warm-water treatments and his condition worsened. During a visit to the school, Alessandro discovered that his son was limping and took him to a doctor, complaining loudly to the headmaster. The monks then took to referring to the boy sarcastically as the “son of a people’s leader,” for which, Benito suspected, he was regularly beaten and mistreated. He detested one teacher in particular, whom he described in the bitterest of language. When the man beat him to the ground for an imagined infraction, Benito threw an inkwell at him, for which he was deprived of all recreation and his main course at dinner for a month. “A feeling of revolt and vengeance,” he confessed, “grew in my soul.” ⁵¹

During the summer that followed, his parents found Benito even moodier and aggressive, prepared, they feared, to drown himself in the Rabbi River. He worked with his father on the threshing machine in July and August, but in September 1893, he was ordered back to Faenza. The second year at school was even more traumatic. For a time, he feigned illness to avoid attending morning mass, but was threatened with punishment if he continued to do so. Soon after the new term began, his patience ran out. When he realized that the poorer students were given bread infested with ants, Benito led a protest that, inevitably, was answered by severe punishment.

In June 1894, Benito fought with a fellow student and stabbed him in the hand with a pocketknife. He was locked in a room for the rest of the day. That night, he felt the wrath of the detested teacher, who grabbed him by the hair and screamed, “Your conscience is black as coal!” In 1911, when Mussolini wrote about the incident in a memoir, he remarked, “Twenty years have passed, and forty will go by, but I will never forget these words.” He was then flung into the exterior corridor to spend the night with the fierce dogs that guarded the school, only to be chased by them when he tried unsuccessfully to open the gate that led to dormitory rooms. With one of the dogs nipping at his pants cuff, he scrambled over the gate just in time.

The school authorities ordered Benito’s expulsion but Rosa pleaded with them to keep him until the end of the term. But this was hardly a reprieve, for during the last month of his stay at the school, Benito spent a week in isolation, after which he was forced to stand during recreational time in a corner of the courtyard and was regularly deprived of dinner. When he left, the headmaster told his parents that he would not be allowed back in the fall.

After two years at Faenza, Benito had gained little in the way of formal education at the hands of his tormenters. Having proved to be gifted with an almost photographic mind and able to memorize assignments after one reading, as a student he passed all his exams easily. When his required study periods were over, he spent most of his time reading borrowed books, mainly adventure stories, and became particularly enamored of the tales of Jules Verne. “The moral education that I suffered,” he said years later, “pressed me to imagine a world of sinners and perverts, in which only priests represented good, disinterest, and piety.” ⁵²

After his carefree years in the countryside, Benito felt imprisoned, persecuted, and tormented at school. So indelibly stamped into his memory were those years that the anger and hatred he harbored never subsided. An official school report on Benito noted that he had “a sharp intelligence and a singular memory, but his character was anything but stable.” The trauma seems to have reinforced the worst aspects of his already sullen personality. ⁵³

By the fall of 1894, after a summer of study at home, Rosa decided that 11-year-old Benito should continue his education at a new school recently opened in Forlimpopoli, the Collegio Giosuè Carducci, named after the famous Nobel Prize-winning poet. A lay institution run by Valfredo Carducci, the poet’s brother, attendance at mass was entirely voluntary and most of the staff held strong anti-clerical sentiments. Discipline was humane and the teachers and staff decent. It was, said Mussolini, “like going from hell to heaven.” Benito would spend the next six years here, formative years during which he developed into a young man with a decent culture and earned a teaching license. ⁵⁴

It was clearly difficult for the Mussolini family to continue supporting Benito’s schooling away from home, and at the end of the first year, Rosa wrote to the prefect of Forlì for a government subsidy, claiming that her son’s education would have to be suspended without financial assistance. The request was refused but Benito earned a small annual scholarship by taking special examinations. He was less well off than most of the students at the school—classmates noticed that the cuffs and knees of his clothing were always mended—but social distinctions among the students were ignored. For the first several years, Benito lived at the school, but in January 1898, he wounded a fellow student with a penknife during a quarrel and was forced to leave the school residence hall. He then lodged in town with the family of a socialist friend of Alessandro’s, who each Saturday morning would come with a cart to bring him home for the weekend. Toward the end of his stay at the school, a stroke of good luck improved his family fortunes slightly when one of his mother’s aunts died and left her an inheritance of perhaps as much as 10,000 lire, a goodly sum that allowed them to pay off their debts and eventually buy a small piece of farm property. He later returned to school lodgings but was expelled again, this time for staying out all night. ⁵⁵

Benito found most of his teachers pleasant if not brilliant. They taught him history, geography, and Italian literature, his best subjects, and he also studied mathematics—which he failed—philosophy, music, French, pedagogy, and drawing. His favorite books now included two epic works of the sixteenth century that glorified medieval warfare and heroic legend, Ludovico Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso and Torquato Tasso’s Jerusalem Delivered. He also developed a passion for Giosuè Carducci’s poems, which were widely popular at the time. Carducci held the chair in Italian literature at the University of Bologna when Benito was studying at the school named after him. His Barbarian Odes (1877–1889) celebrated the pagan spirit and classical forms as inspired by imperial Rome. He had also achieved notoriety for his polemics against the papacy and the Italian monarchy. Benito himself began to write poetry during his last year in school, as did many of his classmates, and by his own admission he filled notebooks with rhymed clichés. Later, he destroyed most of what he had written in those days, but he did keep one, dedicated to the French radical socialist François Babeuf, who had advocated the abolition of private property during the French Revolution. ⁵⁶

When not in class, Benito would generally climb up to the rooftop of the church that was attached to the school with an armload of books and spend the day alone, absorbed in reading, still his major pastime. Classmates found him “taciturn” and “serious,” but no longer constantly angry and sullen. Finally, he seemed to have made a few friends, including Sante Bedeschi and Rino Alessi, whom he invited to his office in Palazzo Venezia years later when he was prime minister. ⁵⁷

One public event stood out in Mussolini’s mind as he looked back on his days at Forlimpopoli. In March 1896, news arrived of the defeat of Italian troops at Adowa in Ethiopia, where Prime Minister Francesco Crispi had sent them to achieve a great imperial conquest. The death of thousands of Italian soldiers at the hands of the indigenous warriors of Emperor Menelik II shocked the nation and brought down the Crispi government. Mussolini remembered that the newspapers were filled with headlines and that his fellow students were consumed with the story for weeks. The blow to Italian pride was staggering, and a strain of patriotic spirit seemed to have imbedded itself permanently in his socialist sentiments. In 1911, despite being in jail for his socialist agitation against the Italian war in Libya, Mussolini wrote that the numbers of the dead and wounded of 15 years earlier “still hammer in my brain”—he would remember the defeat bitterly years later as “the stain of Adowa.” ⁵⁸

As he entered his teens, aspects of Benito’s character seemed already well formed. Thirty years later, he would point out to an interviewer that “Anyone who knew me well at that time could already have recognized when I was sixteen what I now am, with all the light and shade.” ⁵⁹ A photograph taken in 1897 reveals much of his personality: with his head tilted back and his arms folded across his chest, he appeared precociously self-willed and arrogant. His wide mouth and full, sensuous lower lip are already pursed in the hint of a smirk, and his large, round eyes peer unabashedly at the camera. The photograph of the 14-year-old boy uncannily suggests what we know will be the appearance of the adult man of 40 years later.

By the time Benito had left school in the summer of 1901, he had “for some time” been calling himself a socialist, on occasion skipping classes to attend political meetings. Unlike most of his classmates with socialist sympathies who wore flowing red bow ties, Benito sported a black tie that expressed solidarity with the anarchist tradition, but his views were still unformed and confused. During summer vacations, he accompanied Alessandro to socialist events. By 1898, when he began to attend socialist meetings in Forlimpopoli, he was a regular reader of Avanti!, the official daily newspaper of the Socialist Party. In April 1901, at the age of 17, he submitted to the paper a review of a book by local socialist Francesco Bonavita, although he withdrew it after learning that it had angered the author, a friend of his father’s (ironically, years later Bonavita would defend Benito in court on numerous occasions and would be among the founding members of the first Fascist organization). From time to time, Benito gave brief speeches at socialist recreational events, including one at a dance hosted by the Karl Marx Circle of Forlì. ⁶⁰

Benito had developed the habit of going off by himself to practice giving speeches, possibly to prepare for his appearances at socialist meetings, and his teachers recognized his public speaking skills. His first formal opportunity to give a talk at school—he called it his “oratorical debut”—came in January 1901, when word came that the venerable Italian composer Giuseppe Verdi had died. For the official school commemoration, Valfredo Carducci chose Benito to give a speech about Verdi’s career. It is suggestive of his way of thinking that in his talk Benito put Verdi’s operatic work in the political context of the Risorgimento, Italy’s struggle for unification. The next day, Avanti! carried a brief notice of the speech by “student comrade Mussolini.” ⁶¹

Benito took his final examinations early that summer, returning home to Dovia with a teaching license after six years. He was now 18. “Each of us students,” he wrote, “confronted his destiny and moved from the narrow confines of school out into the wider and dangerous field of life.” ⁶²

For the young Mussolini, the completion of six years of studies at Forlimpopoli seemed the prelude only to an uncertain future. With the wider world open to him, the prospect of remaining isolated in Dovia oppressed his restless spirit. At home, he kept to himself much of the time, writing and reading, going out only at night. “I have lost weight, am pale and sullen,” he wrote to his friend Sante Bedeschi in late July 1901. “I see these things in the mirror, but they are merely conditions that reflect my soul, which aspired to a less ignoble youth.” ⁶³

Mussolini spent the summer and fall of 1901 studying for the competitive examinations required for a teaching position while trying to find a suitable opening. In the meantime, he indulged the moods and unfocused urgings of his 18 years, writing poetry and pouring his despair into letters to Bedeschi. By mid-August, when he was turned down for a post in Predappio, he grew more despondent, complaining that he was sick of Dovia, and became an even greater recluse. A reprieve came later that month when a school friend, whose family had a house on the coast, invited him to visit; he spent the next month hiking and swimming along the Adriatic. ⁶⁴

Mussolini’s applications for jobs were continually rejected. “Frankly,” he lamented, “I don’t know where else to turn.” He studied Latin and took violin lessons in Forlì, spending days reading in the public library there. In December, he published his first article, a short essay on the social background of the Russian novel, in an obscure educational journal. When a position as assistant clerk for the commune of Predappio became vacant, he applied for that, but again to no avail—the council was then in the hands of conservatives and his father’s politics worked against him. A turn of luck finally came after Alessandro wrote for help to a friend in Gualtieri, a small town along the Po River in the region of Reggio Emilia and the first commune in Italy run by a socialist administration. In January 1902, word came that Mussolini had been offered a substitute teaching post in a tiny hamlet outside Gualtieri. The salary was low—56 lire a month, of which 40 would have to go for room and board—but he accepted with great relief, leaving Dovia the following month. ⁶⁵

Mussolini arrived in Gualtieri dressed in a cheap jacket, a wide brimmed black hat, and a cape, and sporting a thin mustache. At the station, a delegation of socialists greeted him and insisted that he make a speech. Standing awkwardly on a small table in the local kindergarten, he proclaimed tersely that he had come to Gualtieri “to work in school and in life,” that “words today had taken on excessive importance,” and that “I prefer action to words. So, to work, comrades!” ⁶⁶

Mussolini’s performance in Gualtieri did not live up to the bravado of his words. He remained in Gualtieri until July, teaching and causing a stir among local socialists. His five months there brought home to him personally for the first time the widening gulf between the reformist and the revolutionary wings of the Italian Socialist Party. Both aimed at the creation of a socialist society, but they differed radically in means. The split had much to do with the ambiguities to be found in Marxism. The bulk of Marx’s writings held to a mechanistic, or historical determinist, interpretation of history, by which he posited that economies over time moved from feudalism to capitalism and finally to socialism. Capitalists and proletarians were locked in irreconcilable conflict, with no room for negotiation, compromise, or bargains. Individual or party interventions were irrelevant; for capitalism eventually was doomed to collapse as a result of the inherent contradictions of the system. Although Marx saw particular events and individual will as sometimes playing a role in history, the overall pattern of historical determinism remained an important basis for his theories. Mussolini, who had read The Communist Manifesto but not Das Kapital, viscerally rejected the reformists but never fully embraced historical determinism. In Gualtieri, the local administration was in the hands of the reformists. Mussolini had not thought coherently about his own position, but he instinctively sided with the revolutionaries, whose views he had inherited from his home environment, where anarchist influences abounded: “My socialism,” he explained years later, “was born Bakuninist, in the school of my father’s socialism.” ⁶⁷ But although he joined the ranks of the revolutionaries, his belief in violence, not historical determinism, fed his revolutionary consciousness.

Aroused by Mussolini’s militancy, the workers of the local socialist circle immediately elected him their secretary. He began a round of speaking engagements in which he vented his enthusiasm for extremism. In March, a local socialist newspaper asked Mussolini to explain his views on socialism. His response was revealing. “My socialist faith,” he proclaimed, “is an ideology that tends toward the extreme revolutionary valorization of the proletariat… Only he who can be certain of sacrificing himself without hesitation for the cause … can call himself a revolutionary. We must resolutely reject the reformism that eschews armed insurrection by the people, who for forty years have been the servants of their own false idols and of falsely democratic institutions. We must have faith first in ourselves and then in the generation able to understand us, namely the young.” Indulging in ever more violent language at a speech commemorating Garibaldi, he aroused the concern of the local socialist authorities. ⁶⁸

By then, Mussolini knew that his teaching job would not be renewed for the next year. The reason, however, was not politics, but sex. Soon after his arrival, he had attended an afternoon dance at which he met a young woman in her twenties named Giulia Fontanesi. She turned out to be married, although her husband was away on military duty. Mussolini carried on a secret and tempestuous affair with Giulia for weeks—he once cut her arm with a knife during an argument ⁶⁹ —until they were discovered and the woman’s in-laws, with whom she was living, threw her out of their house. She moved into a furnished room and, recalled Mussolini, “each night I went to her. She always met me at the door. Sometimes we went into the countryside and we made love in the fields along the banks of the Po. They were magical months. Our love was violent and jealous… Little by little I accustomed her to my exclusive and tyrannical love. She obeyed me blindly. I used her as I pleased. In the town our relationship became the object of scandal, and by now we made no secret of it… So I made a plan to immigrate to Switzerland to try my luck. I would then call Giulia to join me.” ⁷⁰

On June 6, he wrote to Bedeschi, “when you receive this I will no longer be in the land of Dante, but in the land of W[illiam] Tell.” He had already requested a passport and asked his mother for money to pay for the trip, lying to family and friends that he had been promised a job in Switzerland. ⁷¹

Switzerland seemed an obvious choice for Mussolini, who was again without a job and wanted least of all to go back to Dovia. The Swiss republic drew unemployed workers from all over Europe, and tens of thousands of Italian immigrants were able to find seasonal jobs there that were often sufficient to sustain them and to send money back to their families in Italy. With its neutral status and its tradition of giving safe haven to refugees, Switzerland had also become a haven for political exiles of all nationalities, especially radicals from Russia and Italy. The high concentration of foreign workers gave rise to socialist and labor organizations that recruited laborers along nationality lines. The period in which Mussolini arrived in Switzerland was a particularly acute one for Italian workers, who were engaged in tumultuous strikes and agitation. These volatile circumstances provided the context in which Mussolini would launch his apprenticeship in socialist politics. ⁷²

Notes

• 1. Quotes are in My Autobiography by Benito Mussolini (New York, 1928), 5, and Emil Ludwig, Colloqui con Mussolini, trans. Tomaso Gnoli (Verona, 1932), 43. Two biographies of Mussolini’s mother were published in the 1920s: Silvia Albertoni-Tagliavini, La mamma del duce (Bologna, 1927), and Virginia Benedetti, Rosa Maltoni Mussolini (Brescia, 1928). One biography of Alessandro, by an old socialist comrade, appeared: Francesco Bonavita, Il padre del duce (Rome, 1933).

• 2. BM, “La mia vita dal 29 luglio 1883 al 23 novembre 1911,” OO, XXXIII, 220.

• 3. Giorgio Pini and Duilio Susmel, Mussolini. L’uomo e l’opera.I. Dal socialismo al fascismo (1883–1919), (Florence: La Fenice, 1953), hereinafter P/S, I, 14–15.

• 4. Ivon De Begnac, Vita di Mussolini (dalle origini al 24 maggio 1915), I, Alla scuola della rivoluzione antica (Milan, 1936), 61–62, 64.

• 5. Paolo Monelli, Mussolini. The Intimate Life of a Demagogue, trans. Brigid Maxwell (New York, 1954), 21; De Begnac, Vita, I, 25; Bonavita, Il padre del duce, 41–42.

• 6. Ibid., 76–77.

• 7. Giuseppe Mazzini (1805–1872) was born in Genoa and became a fervid patriot, participating in the conspiratorial uprisings of the secret Carbonari organization. In 1831, he formed his Young Italy association, and in 1849, became a leader of the Roman Republic. He spent much of his life in exile in France and England.

• 8. Mikhail Bakunin (1814–1876) was born near modern Kalinin, Russia, of minor nobility. After a brief career in the army, he went to university and studied philosophy, becoming an admirer of Kant and Hegel. After studying in Germany, where he became interested in socialism, he emigrated to Switzerland. In Paris, he met Pierre Proudhon, from whom he developed his ideas of the state. He led an uprising in Dresden during the revolutions of 1848, and was subsequently extradited to Austria and then back to Russia, where he spent years in prison and in Siberia. Escaping from his exile, he made his way to London, where he befriended Mazzini. In 1864–1867, he lived in Italy, returning thereafter to Switzerland. On Bakunin and his influence in Italy, see Nunzio Pernicone, Italian Anarchism, 1864–1892 (Princeton, 1993), T.R. Ravindranathan, Bakunin and the Italians (Kingston, 1988), and M. Nejrotti, “Bakunin, Michail,” in Franco Andreucci and Tommaso Detti, Il movimento operaio italiano. Dizionario biografico, I (Rome, 1975), 123–136.

• 9. RDF (Renzo De Felice), Mussolini il rivoluzionario (1883-1920) (Turin, 1965), 5; De Begnac, Vita, I, 87–89; Francesco Bonavita, Mussolini svelato (Milan, 1924), 39–40. On the general background to internationalism in the Romagna in these years, see Gastone Manacorda, Il movimento operaio italiano attraverso i suoi congressi. Dalle origini alla formazione del partito socialista (1853–1892) (Roma, 1963), 121, 125–126, 129–130.

• 10. Andrea Costa (1851–1910) was born in Imola and was first inspired by democratic and republican principles. By the late 1860s, he had broken with the republicans and adhered to the Internationalist movement, becoming one of its most active leaders. He spent 19 months in prison for his role in the 1874 uprising. He met Anna Kuliscioff in Switzerland. After his abandonment of anarchism, he was elected to Parliament in 1882, the first socialist to sit in the Italian legislature. On Costa, see Manuel G. Gonzales, Andrea Costa and the Rise of Socialism in the Romagna (Washington, DC, 1980).

• 11. RDF, Mussolini il rivoluzionario, 5.

• 12. On Il Capitale di Carlo Marx brevemente compendiato da Carlo Cafiero (Milan, 1879), see Humbert Gualtieri, The Labor Movement in Italy (New York, 1946), 121, and Richard Hostetter, The Italian Socialist Movement, I, Origins (New York, 1958), 389; on Gori’s Manifesto del partito communista see Andreucci and Detti, Il movimento operaio italiano, II (Rome, 1976), 523.

• 13. Anna Kuliscioff (1854–1925) was born in Moskaja, Russia, of a well-to-do Jewish family named Rosenstein. She enrolled in the Polytechnic Institute of Zurich in 1871 and soon joined the radical underground. Back in Russia again two years later, she became involved in the populist movement. Hunted by the Tsarist police, she escaped and made her way back to Switzerland. In Italy in 1880, she and Costa by now socialists, were arrested and spent five months in prison. In 1884, she moved to Naples, where she took a degree in medicine. Her relationship with Costa cooled and she met Filippo Turati. She and Turati moved to Milan in 1889. Kuliscioff was an ardent advocate for women’s rights and for their place in the socialist movement. See M. Casalini, “Kuliscioff, Anna,” in Andreucci and Detti, Il movimento operaio italiano, III (Rome, 1977), 6–20.

• 14. Quoted in R. Zangheri, “Costa, Andrea,” in Andreucci and Detti, Il movimento operaio italiano, II, 113.

• 15. Gaudens Megaro, Mussolini in the Making (Boston and New York, 1938), 27. Alessandro Mussolini wrote occasional articles for La Rivendicazione, La Lotta, and Il Risveglio. See De Begnac, Vita, I, 350; P/S, I, 404–407.

• 16. “Che cosa è il socialismo,” La Rivendicazione (Forlì), February 10, 1891, quoted in Megaro, Mussolini in the Making, 27, and RDF, Mussolini il rivoluzionario, 7.

• 17. RDF, Mussolini il rivoluzionario, 5; P/S, I, 17; Bonavita, Il padre del duce, 150. On the police surveillance system (ammonizione) see Pernicone, Italian Anarchism, 131–132.

• 18. Albertoni-Tagliavini, La mamma del duce, 50–52.

• 19. Beltramelli, 60; DeBegnac, Vita, I, 93.

• 20. Bonavita, Il padre del duce, 109.

• 21. Bonavita, Il padre del duce, 106–107.

• 22. P/S, I, 17. De Begnac, Vita, I, 100–101, 305–306.

• 23. De Begnac, Vita, I, 104, 133.

• 24. RDF, Mussolini il rivoluzionario, 5.

• 25. P/S, I, 17; De Begnac, Vita, I, 100.

• 26. BM, “La mia vita dal 29 luglio 1883 al 23 novembre 1911,” OO, XXXIII, 219.

• 27. Manacorda, Il movimento operaio italiano attraverso I suoi congressi, 210–211; RDF, Mussolini il rivoluzionario, 5–6.

• 28. Quoted in Megaro, Mussolini in the Making, 26–27.

• 29. De Begnac,Vita, I, 102–103, 146–172, 204–205; Bonavita, Il padre del duce, 132–143.

• 30. Megaro, Mussolini iin the Making, 38; De Beganc, Vita, I, 25; Bonavita, Il padre del duce, 119.

• 31. De Begnac, Vita, I, 165–167.

• 32. Bonavita, Il padre del duce, 120.

• 33. Mussolini’s quote is from his “Mio padre,” OO, III, 276, originally in La lotta di classe, November 26, 1910. On the financial disputes in the family, see Bonavita, Il padre del duce, 168–171; P/S, I, 24; De Begnac, Vita, I, 101, 133–134; P/S, I, 25.

• 34. Albertoni-Tagliavini, La mamma del duce, 8–9; De Begnac, Vita, 133–134; Bonavita, Il padre del duce, 169–171, 175; Giuseppe A. Borgese, Goliath. The March of Fascism (New York, 1938), 178–179.

• 35. De Begnac, Vita, I, 134–136, 138, 141; Rino Alessi, Il giovane Mussolini rievocato da un suo compagno di scuola (Milan, 1969), 14; the “bourgois I” is from BM, “La Gente Nuova,” L’Avvenire del Lavoratore, September 20, 1902, OO, I, 19; the Mussolini quote is in Yvon De Begnac, Palazzo Venezia: Storia di un regime (Rome, 1950), 131.

• 36. Monelli, Intimate Life, 20.

• 37. De Begnac, Vita, I, 132; BM, Vita di Arnaldo (1932), OO, XXXIV, 141–142; Mussolini’s quote is from BM, “La mia vita dal 29 luglio 1883 al 23 novembre 1911,” OO, XXXIII, 220.

• 38. Alessandro Mussolini, “Tutti in America,” in Il Pensiero Romagnolo, March 20, 1898, reproduced in P/S, I, 406. See also Megaro, Mussolini in the Making, 30–31.

• 39. Edvige Mussolini, Mio fratello Benito. Memorie raccolte e trascritte da Rosetta Ricci Crisolini (Florence, 1957), 12.

• 40. Beltramelli, 66.

• 41. Sarfatti, Life of Benito Mussolini, 35.

• 42. Quotes: BM, Vita di Arnaldo, (1932), OO, XXXIV, 145; Beltramelli, 70; BM, “La mia vita dal 29 luglio 1883 al 23 novembre 1911,” OO, XXXIII, 220. See also De Begnac, Vita, I, 129–131, 136; see also Mussolini’s comments in his Il mio diario di guerra for Christmas 1916, OO, XXXIV, 101.

• 43. Sarfatti, Life of Benito Mussolini, 31–32; Alessi, Il giovane Mussolini, 27; De Begnac, Vita, I, 138; Albertoni-Tagliavini, La mamma del duce, 14–15.

• 44. BM, “La mia vita dal 29 luglio 1883 al 23 novembre 1911,” OO, XXXIII, 220–221.

• 45. BM, “La mia vita dal 29 luglio 1883 al 23 novembre 1911,” OO, XXXIII, 220; Sarfatti, Life of Benito Mussolini, 62; Beltramelli, 73; Edvige Mussolini, Mio fratello Benito, 158.

• 46. Sarfatti, Dux, 32–33, 39; BM, Vita di Arnaldo (1932), OO, XXXIV, 144–146; BM, “La mia vita dal 29 luglio 1883 al 23 novembre 1911,” OO, XXXIII, 233; Alessi, preface to Bedeschi, Anni giovanili, 25.

• 47. Ottavio Dinale, Quarant’anni di colloqui con lui (Milan, 1953), 16–17; A. James Gregor, Young Mussolini and the Intellectual Origins of Fascism (Berkeley, 1979), 35; A. Bortone, “Ardigò, Roberto,” in Dizionario biografico degli Italiani, IV (Rome, 1962), 20–27. Mussolini cited Ardigò frequently in his early articles.

• 48. Benedetti, Rosa Maltoni Mussolini, 71.

• 49. De Begnac, Vita, I, 167–168.

• 50. BM, “La mia vita dal 29 luglio 1883 al 23 novembre 1911,” OO, XXXIII, 220–223; P/S, I, 30, 34.

• 51. BM, “La mia vita dal 29 luglio 1883 al 23 novembre 1911,” OO, XXXIII, 223–227.

• 52. BM, “La mia vita dal 29 luglio 1883 al 23 novembre 1911,” OO, XXXIII, 228–233; De Begnac, Vita, I, 185.

• 53. Quote from De Begnac, Vita, I, 313. See also RDF, Mussolini il rivoluzionario, 11; Alessi, Il giovane Mussolini, 11.

• 54. Quote from BM, “La mia vita dal 29 luglio 1883 al 23 novembre 1911,” OO, XXXIII, 234. See also RDF, Mussolini il rivoluzionario, 13, and Alessi, Il giovane Mussolini, 13.

• 55. Rosa Maltoni Mussolini to Prefect of Forlì, September 20, 1895, in De Begnac, Vita, I, 315–316; Alessi, preface to Bedeschi, Anni giovanili, 22, 26; P/S, I, 44; BM, “La mia vita dal 29 luglio 1883 al 23 novembre 1911,” OO, XXXIII, 237–238, 253; RDF, Mussolini il rivoluzionario, 15–16; Edvige Mussolini, Mio fratello Benito, 16.

• 56. BM, “La mia vita dal 29 luglio 1883 al 23 novembre 1911,” OO, XXXIII, 240–244; Bedeschi, Anni giovanili, 59; Alessi, preface to Bedeschi, Anni giovanili, 20, 31; De Begnac, Vita, I, 214, 227–228.

• 57. Bedeschi, Anni giovanili, 58, 60; Alessi, Il giovane Mussolini, 11–12; BM, “La mia vita dal 29 luglio 1883 al 23 novembre 1911,” OO, XXXIII, 244.

• 58. BM, “La mia vita dal 29 luglio 1883 al 23 novembre 1911,” OO, XXXIII, 235, 237; BM, Vita di Arnaldo, (1932), OO, XXXIV, 145.

• 59. Ludwig, Colloqui con Mussolini, 44.

• 60. BM, “La mia vita dal 29 luglio 1883 al 23 novembre 1911,” OO, XXXIII, 238, 242–243; RDF, Mussolini il rivoluzionario, 14–18; De Begnac, Vita, I, 199; Alessi, preface to Bedeschi, Anni giovanili, 26.

• 61. The text of the Avanti! notice, July 29, 1901, along with one that appeared in Il Resto del Carlino, a major daily of Bologna, is in OO, I, 244–245. See also BM, “La mia vita dal 29 luglio 1883 al 23 novembre 1911,” OO, XXXIII, 242; Alessi, preface to Bedeschi, Anni giovanili, 43–47.

• 62. BM, “La mia vita dal 29 luglio 1883 al 23 novembre 1911,” OO, XXXIII, 242.

• 63. BM to Sante Bedeschi, n.d. but July 1901; see also letters of July 17, August 3, 1901, all in OO, I, 203–207.

• 64. BM to Bedeschi, August 16, 1901, OO, I, 207; De Begnac, Vita, I, 237–238.

• 65. BM to Bedeschi, September 21, 1901, OO, I, 3–4, 208; P/S, I, 60–61; BM to Municipal Council of Predappio, December 6, 1901, OO, I, 208, 231; Sarfatti, Dux, 47; De Begnac, Vita, I, 243. On the Gualtieri period, see especially De Begnac, Vita, I, 243–264.

• 66. Quoted in De Begnac, Vita, I, 246.

• 67. De Begnac, Taccuini Mussoliniani, 9.

• 68. Quoted in De Begnac, Vita, I, 253–254; ibid., 261–263; BM to Bedeschi, March 12, 1902, OO, I, 208–209.

• 69. BM, “La mia vita dal 29 luglio 1883 al 23 novembre 1911,” OO, XXXIII, 248; Fabrizio Castellini, Il ribelle di Predappio (Milan, 1996), 38–42.

• 70. BM, “La mia vita dal 29 luglio 1883 al 23 novembre 1911,” OO, XXXIII, 246.

• 71. BM to Bedeschi, June 6, 1902, OO, I, 210; De Begnac, Vita, I, 2326–2327.

• 72. See Guido Pedroli, Il socialismo nella svizzera italiana, 1880–1922 (Milan, 1963).