In Europe

as
fasci
, against the large landowners and the state. Tax offices were plundered and large estates occupied, all under the banners of Marx, the Virgin Mary and ‘good King Umberto’. Mussolini built upon those rebel traditions, upon the rural anarchism of Mikhail Bakunin, upon the struggle against the ‘alien’, elitist state. The
Arditi
, the ‘fearless ones’ – crack units formed during the First World War and operating on the fringe ever since – were the Italian counterparts of the German
Freikorper
. These commandos, some 10,000 in all, went about dressed in black, wore a skull and crossbones as their emblem and spoke only in the form of exchanges screamed back and forth between the commander and his troops. Their language, clothing and folklore was adopted by Mussolini as that of the ‘typical Italian male’, and later by Fascists and Nazis all over Europe.
    Within a short time of Mussolini setting up the Fasci di Combattimento on Milan's Piazza San Sepolcro, on 23 March, 1919, his
fasci
could no longer be distinguished from the
Arditi
. In the first month of their existence, the Milanese
fasci
attacked and destroyed the offices of
Avanti!
, the socialist party organ that Mussolini had led with such verve in his younger years. Three years later, with the help of the large landowners, they effectively and brutally stamped out the socialist and Catholic workers’ movements and purged local politics of their representatives by murder, beatings, arson and intimidation.
    Terror paid off: this, too, was what Hitler learned from Mussolini. On 16 October, 1922, Mussolini and his men – under pressure from the
fasci
– decided to take Rome within the next two weeks. On 27–28 October, 1922, the legendary March on Rome was held. Some 20,000 poorly armed Fascists moved on the capital and stopped only thirty kilometres from the city; at that point, half the men turned and went home. (Mussolini himself, by the way, had simply taken the
direttissimo
, the express train, from Milan to Rome.) The government, however, was thrown into such a state of panic that it resigned. King Victor Emmanuel III refused to declare a state of emergency. Instead, the next day he asked Mussolini to form a new government. Like Franz von Papen later in Germany, the king hoped in this way to co-opt the Fascists. But Mussolini had no intention of disbanding his gang of thugs. In the April 1924 elections his government receivedtwo thirds of the vote. When the socialist Giacomo Matteotti stood up in parliament and stated that the election results were based on fraud and terror, which was nothing but the truth, it cost him his life.
    By 1925, everything the Nazis could only dream of in the 1920s had already been achieved in Italy.
    Then, for most Italians, began the years of indifference, of
Gli Indifferenti
as the title of Alberto Moravia's 1929 novel went. From 1925, the ‘Roman salute’ was mandatory at schools and universities, and almost everyone complied. The textbooks were placed under strict government censorship and every civil servant had to sign a declaration of loyalty to Mussolini; only a few avoided doing so. Making compromises and toeing the line, according to the American author Alexander Stille, constituted the norm in Fascist Italy; most people led their lives in a world of moral greyness, searching blindly for ways to maintain their integrity – to do their jobs well, to avoid the worst forms of obeisance, to lead a morally impeccable life – rather than follow the path of direct resistance.
    All the more exceptional then were the few young men who actually did begin active resistance – those, for example, associated with Vittorio Foa's Giustizia e Libertà movement. In 1937, after giving the call to fight against Fascism in Spain – ‘Today in Spain, tomorrow in Italy’ – the move-ment's leaders, the brothers Carlo and Nello Rosselli, were murdered by French fascists operating on behalf of the Italian secret police. Foa himself spent eight years in prison, even though he could have obtained his freedom at any time by requesting a pardon from Mussolini. His friend, the brilliant Leone Ginzburg, lost his job at the University of Turin in 1933 because he refused to take the Fascist oath. In 1934 he was sentenced to two years in prison for his work for Giustizia e Libertà, and from 1940 he lived with his wife and young children in internal exile in the remote Abruzzi. He did not survive the war. Foa later