Abstract

The Biennio Rosso of post-World War I Italy—that “Red Two Years” of popular upsurge which began with radical dreams and collapsed in exhausted despair—stands as a great political landmark. Part of the great wave of popular and working-class upheavals that swept across Europe in the aftermath of the war and the Bolshevik Revolution, a movement constituting the first political threat to capitalism in Italy, it contained all the elements of a rapidly-unfolding, tense, at times amusing, and ultimately tragic, historical drama. There was the unremitting cycle of political and economic warfare, from lockouts and mass strikes to demonstrations, public assemblies, and street clashes that culminated in the Turin General Strike of April 1920 and the “Occupation of the Factories” in September of the same year.