Arturo Toscanini is beaten up by fascist Blackshirts

The concert at Bologna’s Teatro Comunale on 14 May 1931 should have been a joyful affair. Arturo Toscanini, a major name on both sides of the Atlantic, had been invited to the recently restored opera house to give a concert of music by Giuseppe Martucci in celebration of the 75th anniversary of the composer’s birth. So willing was the maestro to remember his late friend