First of all, would you even want to be called Italian?

I’m reflecting recently on the history of fascism, for unfortunately current reasons, and that included a brief tour of the wikipedia page on mussolini’s assassination attempts.  I had mentioned in fond terms the Irish woman who tried to kill him, tho it seems likely she was more motivated by mental illness than ideology.  In checking out that page I also found a few archetypal “bomb throwing anarchists,” which got me thinking about them.

I have only a slim outside idea of the history, and who knows how much of it is real, how much propaganda?  Sacco and Vanzetti were names that made a brief appearance in a junior high textbook.  I once saw a blogpost about the history of anarchy among Italian immigrants to the usa, how they aggressively threatened priests who had evangelized to them.  I imagine some of them volunteered in the Spanish Civil War.  Serious characters.

What happened to them?  Was their movement broken?  Did their kids all quietly integrate into the mainstream?  Or did they never go away?  Are they still around, still at it?  An unbroken chain of political culture going back to the days when lil benny and his wife got strung up?

Did they exist before Italy existed, among its various provinces when they were still city-states?  Did they emerge as resistance to the nationalism that forged the modern state?  Would they resent being called Italian, preferring Florentine, Lombard, Sicilian?  Was the whole movement centered in one province?

Hey, maybe I’ll copy-paste this whole line of curiosity to a chatbot, following the links it provides or taking them with salt.  Meanwhile, I just leave you with vague meanderings.

It’s hard to imagine a radical left community having that strength, coming from my shithole country.  Anarchists here are scattered college kids, a vanishingly tiny fraction of the population.

Italian anarchists, or whatever nationality you prefer, if any, I salute you.  From what I’ve heard about Italy’s current government, your work is not done.  No gods, no masters.  Long live the fighters.

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Edit to Add:  Here’s what Claude Sonnet had to say…

Here’s what I can tell you:
Did Italian anarchism predate Italy?
Sort of — but not in the way you might imagine. The earliest signs of anarchism in Italy appeared in the 1850s and 1860s, emerging from the dominant republican and nationalist movement headed by Garibaldi and Mazzini. So it grew alongside the Risorgimento (Italian unification), not in opposition to some ancient city-state tradition. The fight for unification created a generation of revolutionaries who then turned around and questioned all forms of authority, including the new Italian state itself. In that sense, the anarchists were the radical wing of the very movement that forged modern Italy — and then immediately became its most committed enemies.

On the identity question — would they resent being called Italian?
This is fascinating. Italian anarchists’ relationship to nationalism was the exact reverse of ordinary long-distance nationalists. Their ideology was anti-nationalist, and their project was not to build the nation-state but to abolish it. They were, however, deeply connected by shared language and culture, and remained committed to political struggle in their homeland. So they’d probably bristle at the label — not in favor of Florentine or Lombard pride, but because they rejected the whole concept of national identity as such.

The Spanish Civil War — yes, you were right about that. Among the almost 3,000 foreign anarchists who fought in the Spanish Civil War, more than 100 came from the United States, and Italian-born anarchists were among them. The Spanish Civil War proved to be their last great campaign in a meaningful sense — the Republican defeat of 1939 meant anarchism permanently lost its last mass base of support.

What happened to the movement? Was it broken?
Fascism crushed it at home brutally but couldn’t fully kill it. The fascists assassinated and detained most of the leaders of the anti-fascist movement, which was completely dismantled by 1924. But remarkably, anarchists immediately threw themselves into armed struggle in the Italian Resistance after Italy’s surrender in 1943, establishing autonomous partisan formations in Carrara, Pistoia, Genoa, and Milan.

Are they still around?

They never went away. The Italian Anarchist Federation (FAI) was founded in 1945 in Carrara, took it upon itself to carry on the legacy of the Italian Anarchist Communist Union suppressed by fascism in 1926, and continues to publish Umanità Nova, an anarchist newspaper originally founded by Errico Malatesta. That’s an unbroken institutional thread. And anarchists are today present nationwide, involved in all principal social and political conflicts, with more than 60 active spaces and an articulated presence online and in the militant press.

There’s also a more militant and controversial strain: an Informal Anarchist Federation (a separate, insurrectionary network) officially appeared in 2003 and has since carried out a series of mostly non-lethal bombings and letter-bomb campaigns against EU officials, financial institutions, and military targets.

The geography question
The movement wasn’t centered in one province, though certain places have symbolic weight. Carrara — a marble-quarrying town in Tuscany — is almost mythologically important to Italian anarchism; it’s where the postwar Federation was founded and where major congresses were held. The industrial north (Turin, Milan, Genoa) was the heart of anarcho-syndicalist labor organizing. But the movement was genuinely national, and its immigrant branches stretched to Argentina, the US, and beyond.
The immigrant question in the US
You’re right that you’ve seen something real. Italian immigrant anarchism in the US was serious and well-organized — figures like Luigi Galleani ran influential publications and networks, and the Galleanist strain was the most militant of all, associated with bombings in the 1910s–20s. Sacco and Vanzetti were part of that milieu. The Spanish Civil War proved to be the last great campaign of America’s diminished anarchist movement — after that, between McCarthyism, assimilation, and the death of the immigrant radical networks, the US branch pretty much dissolved. The kids did, largely, integrate into the mainstream.

The Italian branch is a different story entirely. Whether you call it an unbroken chain or a series of revivals is a matter of interpretation, but the culture, the institutions, and the publications have genuine continuity from Malatesta’s day to the present.

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