Arditi del Popolo
아르디티 델 포폴로
An Italian militant anti-fascist group founded at the end of June 1921 to resist the rise of Mussolini’s National Fascist Party and the violence of the Blackshirt squads. It grouped revolutionary trade unionists, socialists, communists, anarchists and republicans as well as some former military officers.
In depth
Founded in Rome by the anarchist Argo Secondari and other veterans of the wartime Arditi assault troops, it had about 20,000 members by the summer. But the Socialist Party kept its distance after signing the Pact of Pacification with the Fascists in August 1921, and the Communist Party under Bordiga ordered its members to leave a body the party did not control, a line Lenin criticised. In August 1922 at Parma the Arditi del Popolo under the deputy Guido Picelli and the townspeople held off some ten thousand of Italo Balbo’s squadristi.