It is November 1925. Italy is already living under a climate of fascist control when Tito Zanibonia World War I veteran and socialist, prepares to change history. From a rented room in front of the Dragoni Hotel, on Tritone Street in the Italian capital, Zaniboni has diligently designed a plan to kill the dictator Benito Mussolini and defeat his regime: a precision rifle, a Lancia Lambda for escape and a projectile are all he has prepared. But the shot never occurs. The police burst into the hotel, thwart the attack and arrest the conspirator, who will later be sentenced to thirty years in prison.
It is one of the first attacks on the life of the Ducethe Italian dictator from the violent March on Rome in 1922 until his fall in 1943, when the defeat against the Allies was already irreversible. An episode that continues to arouse persistent cultural and historical interest, as demonstrated the recent publication in Italy from I want to kill Mussolini (I want to kill Mussolini), by the journalist and writer Bruno Manfellotto, published by Laterza, a publisher with a long tradition of titles—including some already classics— dedicated to the figure of the fascist leader.
Benito Mussolini, in an archive image. / TEN
Manfellotto’s book is also based on a brilliant intuition: to compile in a single volume not only twelve cases of men and women accused of having wanted to assassinate Mussolinibut also intertwining their stories with the chaos and violence of the time. This is how the picture is completed: Manfellotto shows in this way how each of these facts They serve the hierarchy as an alibi to speed up its authoritarian driftespecially between 1924 and 1927, when fascism completed its transformation into a dictatorship.
lone wolves
It happens from the beginning. After the attack by Tito Zaniboni, Mussolini responds with a package of drastic measures: dissolves opposition parties, tightens censorship on the press and practically reduces Parliament to a merely formal role, while creating and reinforcing structures of repression such as the OVRA, dedicated to political persecution. The same logic prevails after the attack on anarchist Gino Lucettiwho in September 1926 placed a bomb in the path of Mussolini’s car in Piazza Pia; The device explodes several meters from Mussolini. From then on, “there is no credible opposition left in Italy, no free press, no legal guarantees. Fascism enters its fully totalitarian phase. Without resistance, Italy succumbs,” says Manfellotto in conversation with this newspaper.
This also explains why all perpetrators are practically lone wolves: individualists abandoned even by related parties and movements, which, due to resignation or disagreements in the fighting strategy, give little or no support to these actions, which in many cases does not prevent assassination attempts from being carried out. “When a system is born from the seed of violenceit cannot be surprising that there are violent acts that try to eliminate it,” says Manfellotto, with a reflection that also challenges the present.
Other stories are more mysterious and leave the taste of a truth only partially known, such as that of Violet Gibson, an irish aristocrat that on April 7, 1926, in the Piazza del Campidoglio in Rome, he took out a Lebel pistol and shoot at him Ducewounding him only slightly in the nose. Declared mentally unstable, Gibson is sentenced to psychiatric confinement and spends the rest of her life in asylums, although The reasons for his action are never entirely clear.. “A police officer, officer Epifanio Pennetta, was convinced that it was an international plot, but they prevented him from continuing to investigate,” says Manfellotto, recalling that both Rome and London were then seeking not to strain their relations.
Lies and half-truths
It is not the only case. Anteo Zamboni, barely 15 years oldlynched to death by followers of the dictator after being identified in turbulent Bologna as the author of a shot at the Duceis another. His profile is particularly disconcerting: Antaeus is a mere apprentice in a small printing press and, in his family and among his acquaintances, he is described with nicknames that reflect an innocent and somewhat naive character. Only his father’s anarchist past (anarchist faith is recurrent in other attackers, such as Michele Schirru, Angelo Sbardellotto and Vincenzo Capuana) appears as an indication, but little more proves his guilt. “After years of investigations, accusations, retractions and revenge, the mystery remains unsolved. Was he really the shooter? Who supplied him with the weapon? Did he plan everything on his own or was he the instrument of an anti-fascist conspiracy?“Manfellotto asks in the book.
The book also delves into lies, concealments and partial truths that the regime snuck in through its propaganda apparatus. So much so that the reconstruction of the “invented” plots is also very interesting, always to justify persecutions and reinforce the narrative of a regime surrounded by hidden enemies, which also coincides with the reintroduction of the death penalty in Italy (1926). “Some in this way ended up being falsely accused even much later in time, just because of internal score-settling in the regime,” says Manfellotto.
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