History of the Italian Anarchist Movement: Origins, Key Figures and Developments

Italian anarchism is one of the richest, most radical and most misunderstood political traditions in modern European history. Emerging from the great cycle of nineteenth-century social struggles, it developed as a revolutionary, internationalist and anti-authoritarian movement, leaving a profound mark on the history of social conflict, antifascism, trade unionism and Italian political culture.

Exploring the history of the Italian anarchist movement means more than reconstructing a sequence of insurrections, repression and political organizations. It also means following the path of an idea that has crossed more than a century and a half of history, changing together with the conflicts of its time: from Proudhonian mutualism to revolutionary internationalism, from the insurrections of the late nineteenth century to antifascism, from the Spanish Civil War to the Resistance and, finally, to contemporary libertarian movements.

But what does rejecting structures of power actually mean? Anarchy does not necessarily imply the disappearance of every capacity to make decisions and organize: the problem concerns, rather, the concentration of power and its transformation into domination. We explored this distinction in greater depth in our article on the relationship between anarchy and power, authority and self-government.

In this guide, we will explore how anarchism emerged in Italy, who its main figures were, which events shaped its development and the forms in which it continues to exist today.

The Origins of the Anarchist Movement in Italy

The roots of the Italian anarchist movement can be traced to the second half of the nineteenth century, against the background of the social and political transformations that swept across Europe after the revolutions of 1848, Italian unification and the expansion of the workers’ movement.

Post-unification Italy was a country marked by deep social tensions: rural poverty, labor exploitation, the Southern Question, political repression and profound inequalities. In this context, anti-authoritarian ideas found fertile ground, particularly among artisans, workers, radical republicans, internationalists and social revolutionaries.

The Influence of Proudhon and the First International

The first thinker to use the term anarchy in a positive sense was Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, who defined it as the absence of rulers and of power imposed from above. His ideas about mutualism, federalism and the autonomy of communities profoundly influenced the emerging European libertarian movement, including the Italian one.

But the true political incubation of the Italian anarchist movement took place within the International Workingmen’s Association, commonly known as the First International. At first, anarchists participated alongside other socialist currents and the communists led by Karl Marx. Deep differences soon emerged, however, between the anti-authoritarian and centralist tendencies.

In 1871, during a London conference of the First International that anarchists did not attend, the Marxist current approved the formation of political parties. At the Hague Congress of 1872, Mikhail Bakunin was expelled from the International. From that point onward, the split between authoritarian socialism and libertarian socialism became irreversible.

The Rimini Conference and the Anti-Authoritarian International

The birth of the organized Italian anarchist movement is generally dated to August 1872, when a conference was held in Rimini that led to the creation of the Italian Federation of the International Workingmen’s Association.

Participants included figures such as Carlo Cafiero, Errico Malatesta, Andrea Costa, Nabruzzi and other delegates from the anti-authoritarian current. The meeting marked the definitive break with the Marxist line and the beginning of an autonomous political path.

The Break with the Marxists

Italian anarchists challenged not only certain tactical choices of emerging Marxism, but its entire political framework: the idea of conquering state power, the central role of the party, hierarchical discipline and the risk of replacing one form of domination with another.

For libertarians, the issue was not to seize power but to destroy its coercive forms. Revolution was not supposed to create a new state, but to open the way to a free federation of communities and associated workers.

Saint-Imier and the Birth of a Libertarian Tradition

In September 1872, the founding congress of the Anti-Authoritarian International was held in Saint-Imier, Switzerland. Here a tradition took shape that would profoundly influence Italian anarchism: internationalism, revolutionary action, federalism, the autonomy of local sections and the rejection of the conquest of political power.

From this point onward, Italian anarchism was no longer merely a tendency within European socialism, but a current with its own political, theoretical and organizational identity.

The First Anarchist Insurrections in Italy

In the years following the Rimini Conference, the Italian anarchist movement entered a strongly insurrectionary phase. The prevailing idea was that revolution should not wait for parliamentary or party-based development, but could emerge through direct action, popular uprising and the triggering of social revolt.

The Insurrectionary Attempts of 1874

After 1872, anarchists and republicans joined together in a National Committee for the Social Revolution. The idea was that the time was ripe for an uprising against the monarchical and bourgeois order of the newly unified Italian state.

During the insurrectionary attempt of 1874 in Bologna, figures such as Cafiero, Costa, Bakunin, Malatesta and Olimpia Kutuzova were involved. The project failed, but it marked an important moment in Italian anarchist political culture: the belief that revolution had to emerge through concrete mobilization rather than parliamentary mediation.

The Matese Band

The most famous episode of this phase was the Matese Band uprising of April 1877. A group of insurgents, including Carlo Cafiero and Errico Malatesta, attempted to spark a revolt in the municipalities of the Benevento area.

The anarchists entered Letino, raised the red-and-black flag, burned tax records and proclaimed the end of state authority. The insurrection was quickly suppressed, but its symbolic significance was enormous. The Matese Band became one of the foundational myths of Italian anarchism: a revolutionary attempt that was at once concrete, desperate and highly symbolic.

Italian Anarchism Between the Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries

After the period of the first insurrectionary attempts, Italian anarchism continued to develop through organizational activity, militant publishing, social agitation, state repression and exile.

After the period of the first insurrectionary attempts, Italian anarchism continued to develop through organizational activity, militant publishing, social agitation, state repression and exile. One example of the repression directed against anarchist militants was the use of forced residence, reconstructed through the experiences of the Calabrian anarchists Francesco Perri and Giovanni Battista Olandese.

This phase was decisive because the movement ceased to be merely a constellation of revolutionary attempts and became a widespread presence in the political and social life of the country.

Another crucial episode in the memory of Italian anarchism is the story of Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, Italian immigrants in the United States who became involved in the North American anarchist movement. Arrested and accused of murder in a climate marked by xenophobia, anti-radicalism and political repression, they were sentenced to death despite serious doubts about the fairness of their trial that emerged from the beginning. Their execution on 23 August 1927 transformed Sacco and Vanzetti into international symbols of injustice against anarchists, as well as of the persecution of immigrants and revolutionary militants in the early twentieth century.

Errico Malatesta and the Organized Movement

Among the central figures of this period was Errico Malatesta, probably the most important Italian anarchist theorist and organizer. Malatesta devoted his life to spreading libertarian ideas, took part in insurrections, founded newspapers, spent long periods in exile and helped give the movement a more solid and lasting structure.

With Malatesta, Italian anarchism developed a greater capacity to combine insurrection, organization, theoretical reflection and popular roots.

Anarchists and May Day

In 1867, a law came into force in the State of Illinois recognizing the eight-hour working day, which had been proposed at the Geneva Congress of 1866. In the following years, May Day increasingly became the international day of workers’ struggle.

In 1886, in Chicago, several anarchists were accused of throwing a bomb at the police during demonstrations. The episode gave rise to one of the great martyr narratives of the international workers’ movement.

Italian anarchists took part in May Day demonstrations in 1891, helping to give the event a strong internationalist and anti-authoritarian character.

Propaganda of the Deed, Repression and Assassinations

At the end of the nineteenth century, part of the European and Italian anarchist movement was marked by the period of so-called propaganda of the deed: the idea that certain exemplary acts of violence could strike at power and awaken popular consciousness.

The best-known case in Italy was that of Gaetano Bresci, who on 29 July 1900 killed King Umberto I in retaliation for the repression of the popular uprisings of 1898 and the massacre ordered by General Bava Beccaris. A few years earlier, in 1897, Michele Angiolillo had killed Spanish Prime Minister Antonio Cánovas del Castillo.

These episodes contributed enormously to the public image of the anarchist as a violent and destabilizing figure, although reducing the entire movement to that period would be deeply misleading. Alongside this tendency, there was extensive work in publishing, popular education, mutual aid, trade unionism and social organization.

The Italian Anarchist Movement in the Early Twentieth Century

At the beginning of the twentieth century, the Italian anarchist movement had a significant presence. It was active in labor struggles, publishing networks, political circles, self-education initiatives and internationalist campaigns.

The Italian Anarchist Communist Union and Umanità Nova

In 1919, the Italian Anarchist Communist Union was established in Florence, drawing on the tradition of the First International and the Rimini Congress of 1872. During the same period, Errico Malatesta returned to Italy.

In February 1920, the daily newspaper Umanità Nova, founded by Malatesta, began publication. The newspaper became one of the main instruments for organizing and spreading anarchist thought. Shut down under Fascism, it resumed publication in 1945 as a weekly.

Italian Anarchists and the Spanish Civil War

The Spanish Civil War represented one of the most significant and dramatic moments in the history of international anarchism and deeply involved Italian anarchists as well.

In July 1936, the attempted coup by nationalist forces against the Spanish Republic opened a conflict in which anarchists played a decisive role, particularly through the CNT and the Iberian libertarian movement.

Camillo Berneri and the Libertarian Front

Numerous Italian anarchists participated in the Spanish Revolution by joining the Francisco Ascaso international column. Among them was Camillo Berneri, one of the most prominent figures of Italian libertarian antifascism.

Berneri was murdered in Barcelona in 1937, amid the Stalinist counter-revolution that harshly targeted forces outside Soviet control. His death remains one of the most tragic and symbolic episodes in twentieth-century European anarchism.

The Impact of Spain on Italian Anarchists

For many Italian anarchists, Spain was not only a battlefield but also practical evidence that a libertarian revolution could organize production, militias, social life and self-government. At the same time, the defeat of the revolution and internal repression brutally exposed the limits and risks of revolutionary conflict in a context dominated by fascism, Stalinism and total war.

Anarchists in the Resistance and Postwar Italy

During Fascism, many anarchists were imprisoned, sent into internal exile or forced to leave the country. Some were veterans of the Spanish Civil War, while others had continued underground activity in Italy or France.

Participation in the Resistance

During the Italian Resistance, anarchists organized in Milan within the Bruzzi-Malatesta Brigades, while in other areas they joined major partisan formations such as the Garibaldi Brigades, the Matteotti Brigades and Giustizia e Libertà. In Carrara, the Gino Lucetti Battalion was formed.

After the fall of Fascism in 1943, anarchists were among the last political prisoners to be released from confinement on Ventotene. Some were transferred to the concentration camp at Renicci d’Anghiari, from which they managed to escape and join the partisans.

The Founding of the Italian Anarchist Federation

In 1945, at the Carrara Congress, the Italian Anarchist Federation was founded, becoming the main anarchist organization in postwar Italy. Figures involved in its foundation included Emilio Canzi, Alfonso Failla and Ugo Mazzucchelli.

The creation of the FAI marked a continuity between the historical nineteenth- and twentieth-century tradition of the movement and its survival within Italy’s new post-Fascist democratic framework.

Anarchists During Italy’s Strategy of Tension

One of the most tragic chapters in the history of twentieth-century Italian anarchism concerns the anarchists’ forced involvement in the strategy of tension.

Giuseppe Pinelli and Piazza Fontana

After the 1969 Piazza Fontana bombing, anarchists were identified as responsible in what became one of the most serious cases of misdirection in modern Italian history. Pietro Valpreda was accused of carrying out the bombing, while Giuseppe Pinelli was detained and taken to police headquarters in Milan.

Pinelli died on the night of 15 December 1969 after falling from a window of the police headquarters. His death became one of the most powerful symbols of repression and state deception in the history of the Italian Republic.

From Criminalization to Historical Reconstruction

In the following years, the responsibility of the neo-Fascist right-wing organization Ordine Nuovo and the involvement of sectors of the Italian intelligence services in the bombings associated with the strategy of tension emerged. The attribution of responsibility to anarchists was therefore exposed as part of a repressive and political construction.

This episode is fundamental to the history of the Italian anarchist movement because it shows how anarchists were not only marginalized and repressed, but also deliberately criminalized.

The Main Figures of Italian Anarchism

The history of the Italian anarchist movement cannot be separated from the figures who embodied its ideas, tensions and contradictions.

Errico Malatesta

Considered the most important Italian anarchist theorist, he devoted his entire life to spreading libertarian ideas, participating in insurrections, founding newspapers and spending long periods in exile.

Carlo Cafiero

One of Bakunin’s earliest collaborators in Italy, Cafiero was a central figure in the birth of the Italian anti-authoritarian movement and took part in its first insurrectionary attempts.

Camillo Berneri

A philosopher, militant and antifascist, Berneri was one of the most influential voices of twentieth-century anarchism. He participated in the Spanish Civil War and was murdered in Barcelona in 1937.

Giuseppe Pinelli

A Milanese railway worker and anarchist, Pinelli became one of the most powerful symbols associated with the strategy of tension following his death at Milan police headquarters in December 1969.

Gaetano Bresci

An anarchist who emigrated to the United States, Bresci killed King Umberto I in 1900 in retaliation for the repression of the popular uprisings of 1898.

The Italian Anarchist Movement Today

Italian anarchism does not belong only to the past. Although its presence is much smaller than during the great periods of the workers’ movement, it continues to exist through organizations, newspapers, archives, collectives and a wide range of political practices.

Organizations, Newspapers and Archives

Today, the principal Italian anarchist organization is the Italian Anarchist Federation, whose historic publication is the weekly newspaper Umanità Nova. The FAI Historical Archive also plays a fundamental role in preserving and transmitting the movement’s memory, collecting documents, correspondence, leaflets, posters and flags from the history of Italian anarchism.

Contemporary Themes and Practices

Contemporary anarchism intersects with themes such as:

• social ecology;
• antifascism;
• self-management;
• mutualism;
• criticism of global capitalism;
• local and territorial struggles;
• libertarian feminism;
• grassroots solidarity practices.

In this sense, the Italian anarchist movement continues to survive not so much as a mass political force, but as a living and dispersed political tradition capable of re-emerging during periods of social crisis.

Books for Exploring the History of Italian Anarchism

To understand the history of Italian anarchism, it is useful to complement general studies with biographies, militant memoirs and works on the First International, the Spanish Civil War, the Resistance and the strategy of tension. A well-constructed reading path makes it possible to understand not only the movement’s political evolution but also its cultural, ethical and social dimensions.

• Gaetano Bresci tessitore, anarchico e uccisore di re
• Critica della democrazia occidentale
• Per una critica anarchica dell’anarchismo
• Pane e rivoluzione: l’anarchia migrante (1870–1950)
• Guerra civile. Bologna dal primo dopoguerra alla marcia su Roma, 1919–1922
• Le influenze borghesi sull’anarchismo
• Fondamenti di Utopia
• Anarchia a tavola

Conclusion

The history of the Italian anarchist movement is the history of a long tension between revolt, organization, repression and the search for freedom. From the break with the Marxist International to the Matese Band, from Malatesta to the Spanish Civil War, from the Resistance to Pinelli, Italian anarchism has passed through some of the most intense and dramatic chapters of modern political history.

Reducing this history to a simple synonym for disorder or violence means failing to understand its complexity. Italian anarchism also encompassed publishing, mutual aid, popular education, internationalism, antifascism, self-management and a radical critique of power. It is precisely this historical and theoretical richness that continues to make its study relevant today.