Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
Inter-War Blues
Though Italy had been on the winning side in WWI, few Italians were in the mood to cel-
ebrate. In addition to war casualties, 600,000 Italians served time as prisoners of war, and
100,000 had died (primarily due to the Italian government's failure to send food, clothing
and medical supplies to its own soldiers). Wartime decrees that extended working hours
and outlawed strikes had made factory conditions so deplorable that women led mass
strikes. Bread shortages and bread riots spread nationwide. Mussolini had found support for
his call to order in the Tuscan countryside, and by 1922 his black-shirted squads could be
seen parading through Florence, echoing his call for the ousting of the national government
and the purging of socialists and communists from all local positions of power. In 1922 the
Fascists marched on Rome and staged a coup d'etat, installing Mussolini as prime minister.
No amount of left-wing purges prevented the country from plunging into recession in the
1930s after Mussolini demanded a revaluation of the Italian lira. While the free-fall of
wages won Mussolini allies among industrialists, it created further desperation among his
power base. New military conquests in Libya and Ethiopia initially provided a feeble boost
to the failing economy, but when the enormous bill came due in the late 1930s, Mussolini
hastily agreed to an economic and military alliance with Germany. Contrary to the bold
claims of Mussolini's propaganda machine, Italy was ill-prepared for the war it entered in
1940.
A powerful Resistance movement emerged in Tuscany during WWII, but not soon enough to
prevent hundreds of thousands of Italian casualties, plus a still- unknown number of Italians
shipped off to 23 Italian concentration camps (including one near Arezzo) and death camps in
Germany.
