# Milan barracks

The Milan barracks, more commonly known as the Assault on Avanti!, was an event that occurred in Milan on April 15, 1919: the attack on the editorial offices of the socialist daily newspaper Avanti! by nationalist, futurist, Arditi and fascist exponents.
The event, which must be placed in the context of the violent climate of the Biennio Rosso in the Kingdom of Italy, represented the culminating phase of a day of clashes between, on the one hand, socialist and anarchist demonstrators, and, on the other, nationalist counter-demonstrators, Arditi, futurists and exponents of the newly formed Fasci Italiani di Combattimento; the latter, with this squad-type action, obtained visibility at a national level for the first time.

## Chronology

On April 15, 1919, a small group of bold and futurists led by the Sansepolcristi Ferruccio Vecchi and Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, despite the cancellation of the planned nationalist demonstration, gathered one by one in Piazza del Duomo and from there reached Piazza Cavour where about 200 nationalists had already gathered, almost all veterans and students. A procession was then formed which began to move from Piazza Cavour towards Piazza del Duomo. Finding itself dealing with a nationalist and a socialist procession, both unauthorised, which were moving through the centre of the city, the police did their best to hinder them so that they did not come into contact. The nationalist procession was split in two and only a small part reached Piazza del Duomo where they attended the rally of Alceste de Ambris and the liberal Candiani, while of the socialist procession, which was also split in two, only the head reached very close to the Duomo, in Via Mercanti.
The police set up new cordons, but the two opposing groups passed through them and came into contact, giving rise to clashes that were easily won by the nationalists, whose core consisted of army officer cadets from the Polytechnic led by lieutenant Mario Chiesa; the nationalists, who were armed, dispersed their opponents with gunshots. Three workers were killed in the clashes: the young nineteen-year-old socialist Teresa Galli, the eighteen-year-old Pietro Bogni and the sixteen-year-old Giuseppe Luccioni, all hit by gunshots to the head, around thirty were wounded. Having thus put their opponents to flight, the nationalists continued their charge, overwhelming the demonstrators who had stopped in Via Dante, chasing them up to the Castello Sforzesco.
Once the procession had been recomposed, the demonstrators, led by Chiesa, Marinetti and Vecchi, headed towards the Avanti! headquarters in Via San Damiano, which was also surrounded by a cordon of about 100 soldiers. The police resisted the pressure of the demonstrators, until a gunshot, almost certainly fired from the windows of Avanti! fatally hit Martino Speroni, one of the soldiers involved in the security cordon. At that point the soldiers gave way to the Arditi and were partly overwhelmed by them. The squadristi, led by the captain of the Arditi Ferruccio Vecchi, assaulted the building, whose occupants fled after attempting a brief resistance with revolver shots. According to Mimmo Franzinelli (who however does not cite any source for this news) "three socialists" were killed in the assault, Pietro Bogni, Giuseppe Lucioni and Ambrogio Franchina. Instead, according to an internal PSI report immediately following the events, Bogni was a bourgeois killed in the clashes in via Dante and Lucioni was a soldier killed in unclear circumstances. According to the squadrista and futurist Edmondo Daquanno, in fact, during the assault on the Avanti! the occupants of the building had all fled from an exit far from via San Damiano, and the Arditi devastated the empty building.
The headquarters of Avanti! was devastated, the Arditi destroyed the machinery and set fire to the premises. After having removed the newspaper's wooden sign and chanting «L'Avanti! non è più», the demonstrators returned to the Piazza del Duomo and the column dissolved.
Some relics resulting from the looting of the editorial office of the socialist newspaper were brought as a gift to Mussolini on the same day at the headquarters of «Il Popolo d'Italia». Milan was declared under a state of siege. The Socialist leadership recommended that calm be maintained and further incidents avoided. The police forcefully broke up some spontaneous protest demonstrations, and arrested 75 workers in Piazzale Loreto who had not respected the ban on assemblies. The strike proclaimed by the Socialist Party ended on April 16. Avanti! launched a public subscription, which less than three weeks later allowed the newspaper to be published again with improvised means (while the new headquarters of the newspaper was then inaugurated on May 1, 1920, with a large popular demonstration).
According to the prefect of Milan, elements of socialist extremism in those days planned the assassination of Mussolini. Interviewed a few days later by «Il Giornale d'Italia», Mussolini attributed the initiative of the squadrist action to the Arditi and the Futurists, but nevertheless assumed moral responsibility, on behalf of the fascists:
   «Tutto quello che avvenne all'Avanti! fu spontaneo, movimento di folla, movimento di combattenti e di popolo stufi del ricatto leninista. Si era fatta un'atmosfera irrespirabile. Milano vuol lavorare. Vuole vivere. La ripresa formidabile dell'attività economica era aduggiata da questo stato d'animo di aspettazione e di paura specialmente visibile in quella parte di borghesia che passa i pomeriggi ai caffè invece che alle officine. Tutto ciò doveva finire. Doveva scoppiare. È stato uno scoppio climaterico, temporalesco. A furia di soffiare l'uragano si è scatenato. Il primo episodio della guerra civile ci è stato. Doveva esserci in questa città dalle fiere impetuosissime passioni. Noi dei fasci non abbiamo preparato l'attacco al giornale socialista, ma accettiamo tutta la responsabilità morale dell'episodio.»
A few days later, the Minister of War, Lieutenant General Enrico Caviglia, received Marinetti and Vecchi in Milan, praising them and appreciating their action against the "subversives".
The inspector general of the Italian Socialist Party Giovanni Gasti later conducted an investigation into the conflicts of April 15 and the behaviour of the police forces; in his report, Gasti explained how the men of the patrol who had the task of guarding the editorial offices of Avanti! and defending it from the attack of the nationalists "did not put up a resistance to the bitter end, nor did they use the muscular force with which they would have overcome a crowd made up of bourgeois elements" since among the attackers there were many veterans and also officers in service, towards whom the soldiers and the carabinieri felt a bond of "respect" and "subordination".
After the attack on April 15, the industrialists of Milan collected the sum (enormous for the time) of 10,000 lire which was divided among the participants and decided to increase the amount of funding for the Arditi, considered by them as a valid body for the protection of the interests of the employers.