What is the story behind the marble monument for martyr Italo Spadoni?

Why was Italo Spadoni  “brutally assassinated by the hired killers of Fascism” in 1924? Who were his assassins? Were they ever brought to justice? These questions have bothered me for several years, ever since I stumbled upon a street in Ponte Buggianese named via Italo Spadoni and found at the end of it a marble monument dedicated to my distant relative in the town’s main square.

By my translation, the plaque reads: “To the memory of Italo Spadoni, who in the flower of his years, on April 1, 1924, was brutally assassinated by the hired killers of Fascism. The people of Ponte Buggianese, sponsored by the Community of National Liberation, all contributed so that those who come after will not forget the martyrs who with their sacrifice prepare the way for the redemption of the people and the wickedness and crimes committed under the regime of Fascism. This marble is set here Sept. 28, 1947.”

Italo Spadoni, 1898-1924

I understand that many civilians who resisted the German army’s occupation of Italy during the latter stages of World War 2 were put to death for their opposition, but nearly all were killed by German soldiers, not their own countrymen. Yes, Fascist bullies harassed, intimidated and beat up those who opposed Fascism, but they almost always stopped short of murder. That is why when Fascists assassinated Parliament Deputy Giocomo Matteotti in June of 1924, the news rocked the country and temporarily weakened the Fascist party. The five men deemed responsible for killing Matteotti were arrested, although they were eventually set free with few consequences as Mussolini recovered from the scandal and strengthened his powerful grip on the country.

Giocomo Matteotti

Matteotti had publically denounced the Fascists for political violence and accused them of electoral fraud. He was publishing a book, substantiating his accusations, titled The Fascisti Exposed: A Year of Fascist Domination. The reason for his targeting was obvious. But what about Italo Spadoni? What did he do to arouse the ire of local Fascists?

It seems that nobody alive today really knows. Enlisting the help of my friend and translator Elena Benvenuti, I talked to some of the old-timers sitting on the sidewalks of Ponte Buggianese. Italo was killed because he was a socialist, they told us. But many people were socialists then. In fact, in 1919, the Socialist Party received 32.2 percent of the votes in the Italian Chamber of Deputies. During the Ponte Buggianese elections in 1919, the Socialist Party in the town gathered the most votes, 443, and Ponte Buggianese was considered among the “regione rosse,” red regions, as 16 of the 20 members of the town council were socialists. Was Italo one of these members, perhaps a leader of the Socialist Party, or an outspoken critic of the Fascists?

The inscription at bottom translates: He leaves in tears his
 inconsolable parents Antonio and Gioconda, his wife
Caterina Di Vita and his daughter Gina.

It seems he was neither a leader nor particularly outspoken. Rather his death was an isolated event, an unfortunate conclusion to a night of adrenaline- or testosterone-induced violence that went farther than intended. It also seems that by 1924, the political climate of Ponte Buggianese had changed so much that no one dared step forward to name the perpetrators of the crime. No one was ever apprehended or charged with Italo’s murder, to the great frustration of his wife, parents and brothers. Because the police investigation came up empty, little was written in the newspapers. Small towns, especially those in Italy, are notorious for gossip, and many names were suggested to Italo’s family, but nothing could be substantiated.

Italo Cortesi shows the cross which marks the spot where
his nonno fell after being shot by a squad of Fascists.

With Elena’s help, I tracked down Italo Cortesi, the grandson of Italo Spadoni, to find out what he knew. He told me much about where Italo was shot. He showed me the field that Italo Spadoni crossed while taking a shortcut home. He pointed me to the ditch that Italo was jumping over when a bullet struck him in the back of the head. He showed me the cross which marks the exact spot where Italo fell. Beyond that, he doesn’t know why his nonno was singled out for the ultimate sacrifice from the many Ponte Buggianese socialists of the era. At first, he suggested that it was retribution for the actions of Italo’s brother Bruno, who was imprisoned for supplying a gun to a man who killed two Fascists. However, I pointed out to him that this incident took place four years later. With that theory discounted, Italo admitted that he didn’t know the reason.

Boccaccino (Silvio Pasquni) is buried here, along with his
daughter Amina. Genitori means parents.

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As to who killed his grandfather, Italo Cortesi had another theory, but I am skeptical of this as well. He told me it was likely a man nicknamed Boccaccino fired the shot. He didn’t know the man’s real first name, but the last name, he thought, was Della Maggiora. That seemed unlikely, I told him, because Della Maggiora was the last name of the man who killed the two Fascists in 1928. OK, he admitted, that was probably not the right name, but he would find out for me. The next day, we went to the cemetery together to look at the graves of Italo Spadoni, his wife Caterina Di Vita, and his daughter Gina Spadoni, Italo Cortesi’s mom. While there, Italo asked the woman selling flowers outside the cemetery if she knew the identity of Boccaccino, and she told us his real name: Silvio Pasquini. He is buried in the same grave with his daughter.

The story Italo Cortesi told me does add an interesting piece to the puzzle, though, and it explains why he suspects Boccaccino.

“It was like a time of war then,” he said. “Not a war against another country but of left against right. Italo was out visiting at the house of Armando Sorini. Around 10 p.m., Boccaccino arrived. He was a Fascist, and he said, ‘Italo, your family wants you at home. There are people in the house visiting.’ And at this point, my nonno went away alone.  He crossed the main street and was going home through some fields. He passed between where there is now a new house and some garages. There was a row of graves, where Boccaccino and others were waiting, and they killed him. He was jumping over a ditch, because they found his body with his fingers reaching up out of the ditch.”

Italo also suspects Boccaccino because when Gina Spadoni would pass by the building where Boccaccino maintained his business, she would mutter things about that “son of a bitch” who had been involved in the murder of her father. Cortesi said he once tried to run Boccaccino off the road when both were riding motorcycles, but Boccaccino veered off the road and escaped on a dirt trail along the river. Cortesi believes that local people at the time knew who killed Italo, but because the Fascists were by then firmly in power, no one would dare speak out and accuse the killer for fear of retribution.

This information at first seems to be a great addition to my knowledge about the event, but I have since come to have doubts about it, based on a book I had found in the library of Ponte Buggianese. One chapter in I Fucilati di Mussolini (The Shots of Mussolini), by Enzo Magri, is dedicated to the story of Michele Della Maggiora. I was not allowed to check out the book, but I photographed the pages and have since painstakingly translated all the passages that mention the death of Italo. Much is known about the case of Della Maggiora because he was tried, convicted and executed for murdering two Fascists, and testimony at the trial was recorded. Bruno Spadoni was tried at the same time, and his story is equally as tragic as that of Italo. Even though the book sheds only a little light on Italo’s death, it is thus far the best source of information I have found.

But let’s back up a bit to set the scene of these turbulent times. When World War 1 ended in late 1918, another war began within Italy. The workers and peasant farmers, fed up with their exploitation by factory owners and wealthy feudal land owners, began to flex their collective muscles. Unfortunately, though they drew on years of pent up passion from living in poverty and powerlessness, they lacked any kind of coordination and planning. They rallied under the banners of socialism and communism to protest against the indignities imposed on them by an uncaring ruling class, and many eloquent documents were written and speeches made about the need for revolutionary change. At first, it was only a rhetorical revolution, but the workers were listening, and their reaction surprised even the revolutionary leaders. The message of the down-trodden received much attention, and more and more socialist and communist politicians were being chosen for elected offices. In fact, 1919 and 1920 were called the biennio rosso, two red years. All this got the attention of the land and factory owners, and they would soon take steps to control the fervor.

This excerpt from an article in the Sept. 20, 2010, issue of “Socialism Today” gives some idea of the era’s turbulence in Italy:

The first major battle of the biennio rosso was fought by the metalworkers, who in the spring of 1919 took strike action and won the eight-hour day. In June and July, soaring price rises provoked another insurrectionary movement in the north. In many areas, citizens committees (embryo soviets) had complete control over prices. In the spring of 1920, the temperature of struggle was rising further with spontaneous strikes breaking out over unbearable economic and social conditions. The curve of strike action was inexorably rising – in 1918 there were 600,000 strikes, in 1919 fourteen million and in 1920 sixteen million.

In 1920, prices continued to escalate – in June 1920, they were 20 percent higher than three months earlier. Though factories had racked up enormous profits during the war, now that the demand for arms and machinery had resided, factory owners were looking to shuffle the effects of the post-war economic crisis onto the working class. The engineering bosses refused to concede wage increases demanded by the unions, and when negotiations broke down and the workers implemented “go-slow strikes,” they were locked out of the factories.

Socialism Today elaborates:

The FIOM (Federazione Impiegati Operai Metallurgici) responded by immediately calling for the occupation of 300 Milanese factories. This was seen by the union leaders as a purely defensive move which would be cheaper than organising a strike. They were completely taken aback by the extent of the struggle which ensued. Accumulated anger exploded. Factories were seized in the industrial heartlands of Turin and Genova, and beyond in Florence, Rome, Naples and Palermo. From engineering the tidal wave of occupations engulfed chemicals, rubber, footwear, textiles, mining and countless other industries. Eventually half a million workers were involved, both unionised and unorganised. Red (socialist) and black (anarchist) flags flew over the occupied factories. Armed ‘Red Guards’ controlled who could enter and leave. Workers themselves maintained order, banning alcohol and punishing workers who broke discipline.

In a speech made in 1922 at the Fourth Congress of the Communist International, Leon Trotsky said, “In September 1920, the working class of Italy had, in effect, gained control of the state, of society, of factories, plants and enterprises . . . In essence the working class had already conquered or virtually conquered.”

While this seems an overstatement, no doubt the ruling class was severely shaken and bewildered. However, the labor movement lacked the vision necessary to press its advantage. The factory and land takeovers were spontaneous actions, and even union leaders were taken by surprise and had no idea how to proceed. Out of this void of leadership would be born the Fascist party, welcomed especially by the wealthy but also by anyone who wanted to see order restored to the country.

In March of 1920, the tenant farmers of Ponte Buggianese, Monsummano and Montecatini went on a two-day strike, refusing to work in the fields and threatening to abandon the farm animals in the valleys. Some of the proprietors accepted the new terms asked by the peasants, but not all, and more strikes were threatened and implemented. Political arguments in the bars and town council meetings were common.

Ponte Buggianese

By February of 1921, the Fascist movement reached the Valdinievole. According to Ponte Buggianese: A Century of History, a book I was given by a helpful librarian, an anonymous letter received in the comune of Ponte Buggianese warned that an expedition of Fascists from Montecatini was coming to Ponte Buggianese to tear down the red flag that flew over the town hall. In May of 1921, three men organized a Fascist group in Ponte Buggianese. In June, three truckloads of Fascists pulled into Ponte Buggianese, firing guns into the air and then vandalizing the house of one of the leading members of the Socialist party.

During the elections of 1921 in the town, the Socialist and Communist parties together received 477 votes, but all the other parties combined received 484. The close results show how divided the community had become. The Ponte Buggianese history book notes: “From now on began the ‘biennio nero,’ the two black years. The red comune was an island besieged and more vulnerable to the internal divisions between the socialists and the communists.”

Blackshirts burn a Socialist headquarters

Fascism at this time was just a movement with a paramilitary organization; it was not an official party. But November 9, 1921, marked the beginning of The National Fascist Party (Partito Nazionale Fascista or PNF). The PNF was instrumental in directing and popularizing support for the ideology of the strangely charismatic Benito Mussolini. In the early years, groups within the PNF called Blackshirts built a base of power by violently attacking socialists, thereby gaining the support of powerful land and factory owners. Within a year, Mussolini was named the head of the government, and persecution of socialists and communists became common. Fearful for their lives, many fled the country.

Among those who left, according to Magri, was Italo’s brother Bruno, just a few weeks before Italo’s murder. Bruno went to Marseille, France, “where there existed a large group of refugees from Tuscany,” according to the Ponte Buggianese history book, which adds: “In Marseille they probably adhered to the Communist cause.” Other refugees named in Magri’s book were Franco Pasquini, “considered the group’s patriarch,” along with Bixio Falchini, Egidio Capini, Romeo Gorini, Gino Queri, Domizio Giuntoli, Aristide Spadoni and Tarcisio Lucchesoni. Shortly after Italo’s death, Michele Della Maggiora fled Ponte Buggianese for Marseille as well.

By an interesting coincidence, Marseille is also where the activist Pietro Spina, in Ignazio Silone’s classic novel Bread and Wine, fled while in political exile, and I see numerous parallels between the life of Spina and the socialist refugees of Ponte Buggianese. Spina tells of engaging in long conversations about freedom and politics with friends in France, and he eventually returns to a life of political activism in Italy. He was asked by an old friend from his school days, “Why did you come back to Italy? If you love liberty, why didn’t you stay in one of the countries where there is liberty?”

Spina replied, “I came back here to be able to breathe. There’s certainly a danger of prison, but that’s not enough to keep me away from my country. I’m an internationalist, but out of my country I feel like a fish out of water. I have had enough of exile. I don’t know how to wait.”

Spina’s friend, who had joined the Fascists so that he could advance his medical career, noted that in school, the two had dreamed the same dreams, but now they belonged to different political parties, and Spina’s response speaks to the passionate feelings that people held about liberty and individual responsibilities in those times.

“Between free men and slaves, in the long run, there is more than a difference of party,” Spina said. “There is a difference of humanity . . . One must not wait. In exile one spends one’s life waiting too. One must act. One must say: Enough! from this very day. Liberty isn’t a thing you are given as a present. You can be a free man under a dictatorship. It is sufficient if you struggle against it. He who thinks with his own head is a free man. He who struggles for what he believes to be right is a free man. Liberty is something you have to take for yourself. It’s no use begging it from others.”

In Italo’s case, though, he refused to leave Italy because of the pull of a family. In 1922, he had married Caterina Di Vita, and the same year daughter Gina was born. His parents were also there. His decision to stay would cost him his life, and indirectly, Bruno’s life as well. In The Fucilati di Mussolini, I find the only account where anything but passing mention of Italo’s death is given:

The first of April, a group of Fascists once again assaulted and roughed up the ex-mayor, Arrigo Sorini, and devastated his house. While Sorini fled, the Fascists beat it to Casa Bianca, a little-populated suburb of Ponte Buggianese, and encountered Pucci Piacentino and Italo Spadoni, two communists who had never flaunted their political convictions. The first suffered a beating and fled on foot. The other also received his share of punches and kicks, but he didn’t have the good fortune to escape. One of the assailants pulled out a pistol, and as Spadoni was running away, he fired a shot at the silhouette of the fleeing man that met its target. One of the bullets found Spadoni’s head and killed him.

The assassination of Italo, considered a mild and accommodating young man, alarmed the anti-fascist residents who remained in the town. Since the Fascists had prepared a list of the next victims, many anti-fascists decided to leave the country.

This account leaves me full of questions, but I doubt I will find answers. Why weren’t Sorini and Piacentino able to identify the squad that included Italo’s killer. On this topic, Magri is silent. It could be that Sorini and Piacentino were afraid to stand up to the Fascists by this time. After all, squads had torn the house of the ex-mayor apart on more than one occasion and not been brought to justice. It also could be that the perpetrators were from Montecatini, Borgo a Buggiano or some other nearby town, and Sorini and Piacentino didn’t recognize them. It was dark when the attack occurred, so it seems quite plausible that they didn’t know who the attackers were. I wondered for a time if Armando Sorini, whose house Italo was visiting before he was killed, and Arrigo Sorini, who house was vandalized by the Fascist squad, were actually the same person, but Italo Cortesi has assured me they were two separate people with houses in different locations. I considered looking up Magri and asking him if he had an opinion about who killed Italo, but I discovered that he is no longer living. He did not give sources for all of his information, so I may have reached the limits of discovery on this issue. 

However, I am not the only one who has wondered who killed Italo. This question especially haunted his mother, Gioconda Niccolai, and Bruno—and they were in much better positions to find the answer. Because Bruno was in France at the time, he carried on an animated correspondence with his mother and Caterina, Italo’s widow. The content of some of these letters apparently made it into the court files and became available to Magri for his book. What they reveal is a strong sense of frustration, even desperation, over the search to find Italo’s killers.

Magri’s account notes that Michele Della Maggiora lived near Bruno in the Sant’Andrea neighborhood of Marseille. Magri writes:

Bruno was not able to make sense of the killing. The young man yearned to know the names of those responsible of this aggressive act, and he dreamed of getting vengeance. He and Della Maggiora, when they met, hypothesized possible members of the group that killed Italo. Based on changing information and their inductive reasoning, they first suspected Cesare Pratesi, known as Palle, then Silvio Pasquini, nicknamed Boccaccino, and then Ludovico Grazzini, known as Lillino. Someone from the town also spoke of Giovanni Buonamici of Borgo a Buggiano, though not as one of the assassins but rather as the coachman who carried the Fascist squad. The sadness of Bruno Spadoni was shared among the other Pontini living at Sant’Andrea. Their thoughts and preparations of repayment would be impossible to realize, though, as they were far from Tuscany.

Bruno had found steady work in Marseille just eight days before Italo’s murder, and Magri writes that because Bruno “had obligations as a new employee, he was also not able to assist at the funeral for Italo.” In his letters to his mother and sister-in-law, he first asked particulars of the assassination and followed up with questions about the state of the investigation. “As the responses from the two women became increasingly elusive,” Magri writes, “Bruno became convinced that the inefficiency of the investigation was due to a studied unwillingness of the investigators assigned to the case. Dominated by an implacable rage, he began to study how he could avenge the death of his brother.”

Curiously, one of the people who fell under Bruno’s suspicion was Mayor Astolfo Spadoni, a distant relative, but one of the Fascists leaders. In his letters, Bruno pleaded with his mother and sister-in-law to tell him the suspects who were under investigation. The women responded that gossip indicated several suspects, but in reality there was no evidence for the chatter because no one else saw the perpetrators. Magri writes:

The vague reports given in a resigned tone did not please the young man. One time, accusing his two relatives of ineptitude, he boldly announced to them that though he was far away, he was able to discover that one of the suspects was Mayor Spadoni, who precisely for the reason that he was under suspicion had left the town for some time. Caterina Di Vita had replied to Bruno that on the day of the crime, (the mayor) was absent from the town because he was working in Prato. Another time the emigrant had asked his sister-in-law if it was true that they had arrested the barber Achille “Galilei” Pagni as a member of the squad, but the woman answered him that this was false news.

Almost a year after the death of his brother, Bruno had lost any hope to see the assassins put in jail. Furious, he mocked the resignation of his relatives when they wrote him that officials “have hopes of arresting someone” but “we need to stay calm.” The young man replied, noting his thoughts: He felt they were just teasing him, giving him a story to placate him. “Otherwise,” he wrote, “by this time something would have happened instead of just turning so many words.”

The lack of resolution for this incident caused continuous pain to the entire family. Bruno felt almost responsible for this misfortune because he left his brother alone in that difficult political period, when the mounting wave of Fascism swept aside the rules of civility even at Ponte Buggianese.

Despite trying to reassure Bruno in her letters, Gioconda experienced the same level of frustration and criticized the police and the magistrate for abandoning the investigation. Magri writes that she “imprudently named four men as the assassins: Mayor Astolfo Spadoni, doctor Giuseppe Romiti, barber Achille Pagni and Natale Giovannini. She also accused coachman Giovanni Buonamici of being guilty . . . of having transported the Fascist squad from Borgo a Buggiano to Ponte Buggianese.”

Maria Gioconda Niccolai

In addition, she directed outbursts at her grocer because she had heard reports that his son-in-law, a Fascist, had been walking on the street nearby when Italo was murdered and she thought he must have seen something. Every time she went to the grocer’s store, Magri writes, “The woman brought up the tragic circumstances and invariably concluded with the same thing: ‘Your son-in-law knows. He saw. Why doesn’t he speak up?’ She was willing to admit that it was not the Fascists of Ponte Buggianese who committed the crime. But no one was able to shake her conviction that the local Blackshirts knew who the assassins were. . . The merchant invariably reassured the woman he had asked his son-in-law several times, and the man replied, truthfully, that he knew nothing of the crime and didn’t see anything the night of April 1.”

Gioconda’s frustration boiled over when the shop owner advised her to be cautious and not “rashly pronounce the names of the alleged killers of her son,” Magri writes. “Rising up, Gioconda shouted, ‘Shut up! You’re like all the others.’ The woman stayed away from the store after that. A little later, someone told the store owner that as she walked away, Spadoni had said in passing, “If someone from that squad that killed Italo died, I wouldn’t cry. No indeed . . .’ ”

Some 14 months after his arrival in France, Bruno re-entered Italy in May of 1925. In one of his letters, he had promised “someone will pay dearly when I arrive home.” But even four years after Italo’s death, Bruno still didn’t know who killed Italo, and the threats he had made came back to haunt him, because they were used against him in the trial that sent him to prison—evidence, the state said, that he had given the gun to Della Maggiora to extract revenge against the Fascist killers of Italo. According to Italo Cortesi, Bruno’s prison floor was covered with standing water, and Bruno took ill and died four years into his imprisonment.

I will relate the stories of Michele Della Maggiora and Bruno Spadoni more fully another time, but it is enough to say now that Della Maggiora’s murder of the two Fascists did not appear part of an organized plan but rather the result of a drunken rage. He had actually set out to confront a man who habitually taunted him, but the man was with a large group of people, so Della Maggiora fled and killed two other Fascists at random.

In summary, in returning to my original questions, I believe I have found some partial answers in Magri’s book. Since neither Sorini nor Piacentino recognized the Fascist squad members, I conclude that the Fascists were not from Ponte Buggianese. Quite likely they were transported by Borgo a Buggiano coachman Giovanni Buonamici, since an out-of-town squad would need transportation. The historical rivalries between neighboring towns in Italy were famously bitter, and passionate groups of young men needed little extra motivation to carry out destructive acts against nearby rivals. At the time, many considered Fascism to be synonymous with patriotism, and that would be all the excuse a squad of rowdy young men needed to play the bully when they encountered a lone “enemy of the state” from a rival town.

The fact that Bruno, Gioconda and Caterina never discovered the squad members’ identities also leads me to believe they were outsiders. If they were from Ponte Buggianese, surely someone sympathetic to the Spadoni family would have seen or heard something in the small town that would indicate who the squad members were. 

I don’t believe the visiting Fascist squad had any intention to kill Italo, but one man, succumbing to a mob mentality, fired in the dark at Italo’s fleeing silhouette and had the bad luck of hitting his target. At this point, the cover-up started. Squad members would have sworn each other to silence to protect themselves. Possibly the shooter was the son of some important political figure in the neighboring town. Quite likely the investigation did reveal who the squad members were, but with Fascists in control now in all the local towns as well as in Rome, the names were kept a secret and the investigation quietly ended. Only a handful of men knew who killed Italo, and they successfully concealed this secret from his family members. Boccaccino may have been among those who knew, but I doubt he, as a local man, was the killer or even a participant. 

If Bruno knew the killer, I believe he would have taken action. Later, Gino, another of Italo’s brothers, returned to Italy after a lengthy sojourn in the United States. Gino had a history of vengeance and violence in the states, and he had narrowly escaped conviction for allegedly murdering a man in Tacoma, Washington. He also was accused of trying to poison someone and setting a house on fire in  California (see Gino a shame to proud Spadoni name). He moved back next door to Gioconda and Italo’s daughter Gina, and if they had told him who killed Italo, he would not have been afraid to take action. In fact, Italo Cortesi told me that Gino spent a lot of time in the cemetery where Italo Spadoni was buried. “He would go to the cemetery and mumble to himself in English,” Cortesi said. “He always carried a gun under his coat, and he talked about getting revenge on the people who killed Italo. He was always very angry about this.”

I wish I could have discovered something more significant, that perhaps Italo had stood bravely in the town square and denounced Fascism, inspiring his compatriots to stand firm, or that the Fascists that Michele Della Maggiora killed were actually the men responsible for Italo’s death. But this is a story of real life, not a novel where all the loose ends are neatly pulled together in the end.  I am satisfied that I have learned much about the incident and the atmosphere during those trying times. Italo’s death does not make a lot of sense, but that is typical of that turbulent period, and realistically I should not have expected anything more or less. History is full of struggles, and it’s been said that troubled times are necessary evils that push us forward, and the lessons and strengths we gain from them help us to avoid making the same mistakes in the future.