COUNTER-REVOLUTION Jig
could no longer obtain a single hour's work, and now that
emigration had become almost impossible were condemned,
with their families, to starvation.
Thus by the middle of 1921 the fascist 'occupation5
included the whole of Julian Venetia, part of Venetia, the
entire Po Valley except Romagna, Cremona, the greater
part of Tuscany, Umbria, and Apulia. In Piedmont the
whole province of Alessandria was infected, particularly the
districts of Gasale and Novi Ligure and the rice-growing
districts of Novara. The provinces of Como and Turin
were hardly affected, but on April 25 in the town of Turin
the fascists managed to occupy and burn down the great
People's House in the Corso Siccardi, the headquarters of
the Chamber of Labour and all the workers3 institutions,
without provoking any active retaliation. The communists,
who controlled nearly all the local organizations after the
split in the Socialist Party, had often defied the fascists to
touch the People's House, threatening them and the in-
dustrialists who subsidized them with ruthless reprisals if
they did so. They could do no more than others had done in
similar circumstances, and declared a general strike. This
allowed the fascists to make off in twenty-four hours with
all the honours of war and a resounding victory won at
small expense.
Lombardy, except for the provinces of Pavia and Mantua,
was as yet almost unaffected. In the capital, Milan, the
explosion of a time bomb on March 23 in the Diana Theatre,
placed there by anarchists as a protest against the imprison-
ment of Malatesta, killed eighteen people and wounded a
hundred. The fascists retaliated not only by attacking the
anarchist paper Umanita Nuova, but by taking the opportunity
of setting on fire and destroying the new offices of Avanti,
newspaper of the socialists, who had had nothing to do with
the affair. Thus the new offices suffered the same fate as
the old, which had been fired by Mussolini's arditi in 1919.
In the Marches and the rest of central and southern Italy
the fascist movement was only just beginning. As may be
seen from the table,1 which is still incomplete, during the
first half of 1921 the fascists destroyed 17 newspapers and
1 P. 120.