The Complete Works of Malatesta Vol. III: "A Long and Patient Work": The Anarchist Socialism of L'Agitazione, 1897–98

By Errico Malatesta

The first in AK Press's ten-volume Complete Works of Malatesta. This one (volume three chronologically) focuses on two very important years in Errico Malatesta's life, when he returned to Italy to edit L'Agitazione. This volume begins the series with a bang.

• Language: English
• Publisher: AK Press
• Release date: Jan 9, 2017
• ISBN: 9781849352598

Errico Malatesta

Errico Malatesta (1853–1932) was an Italian anarchist. He spent much of his life exiled from Italy and more than ten years in prison. Malatesta wrote and edited a number of radical newspapers and was an enormously popular public speaker in his time, regularly speaking to crowds numbering in the tens of thousands.

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Complete works of

ERRICO MALATESTA

Volume III

edited by davide turcato

The Complete Works of Errico Malatesta

Volume I

Whoever is Poor is a Slave:

The Internationalist Period and the South America Exile, 1871–89

Volume II

Let’s Go to the People:

L’Associazione and the London Years of 1889–97

Volume III

A Long and Patient Work…:

The Anarchist Socialism of L’Agitazione, 1897–98

Volume VI

Towards Anarchy:

Malatesta in America, 1899–1900

Volume V

The Armed Strike:

The Long London Exile of 1900–13

Volume VI

Is Revolution Possible?:

Volontà, the Red Week and the War, 1913–18

Volume VII

United Proletarian Front:

The Red Biennium, Umanità Nova and Fascism, 1919–23

Volume VIII

Achievable and Achieving Anarchism:

Pensiero e Volontà and Last Writings, 1924–32

Volume IX

What Anarchists Want:

Pamphlets, Programmes, Manifestos and Other Miscellaneous Publications

Volume X

Yours and for Anarchy…:

Malatesta’s Correspondence

A LONG AND PATIENT WORK…

THE ANARCHIST SOCIALISM OF L’AGITAZIONE, 1897–1898

introductory essay by

roberto giulianelli

translated by paul sharkey

Editor’s Foreword

Davide Turcato

This volume collects Errico Malatesta’s writings from 1897 and 1898, and is part of Malatesta’s complete works, which encompass all his published and unpublished writings. The aim of this project is to document Malatesta’s thought as fully as possible.

Besides the texts whose authorship can be attributed to Malatesta, we also included texts authored by other people, which report views as expressed by Malatesta. This distinction between his own writings and other people’s writings intersects with the previous distinction between published and unpublished writings, leading to a fourfold partition that may be of use in classifying the documents that have been included in the complete works:

1. Own published writings: this is obviously the category comprising the vast majority of the texts. This group includes all articles, pamphlets, and other printed works by Malatesta.

2. Own unpublished writings: besides any works meant for publication that may have been written but never completed or delivered, we can place in this category all of Malatesta’s correspondence, to which a specific volume of the complete works will be devoted.

3. Other people’s published writings: included here are printed texts that, strictly speaking, are other people’s work, but which report almost directly Malatesta’s words—that is to say, interviews, speech reports, whenever they are sufficiently comprehensive and reliable, and transcripts of apologias in court. Included here as well are collective documents such as programs and manifestos, emanating from groups of which Malatesta was part.

4. Other people’s unpublished writings: into this category can be placed documents from government sources, such as speech reports drafted by informants and police officials, interrogation transcripts, and other trial records.

This last category requires a brief explanation. Documents in this class must obviously be treated with great caution, suggested by broad considerations of reliability—which, incidentally, also apply to reports carried in the press hostile to anarchism. Above all, however, caution is required by documents attributable to Malatesta but produced while he was in custody. Even though an interrogation can be superficially equated with an interview, the state of captivity in which it takes places should keep one from unproblematically regarding it as a genuine expression of the speaker’s thought. Suffice it to mention the opportunistic outlook expressed by Malatesta himself, who, commenting upon a comrade’s decision to refuse release on probation, argued that it was naïve to deny oneself the opportunity to do good for the sake of repudiating empty formalities which carry no moral authority the moment they are forced upon us by brutish violence.¹ Rather than include or exclude these type of documents en bloc, we have decided to assess them on a case by case basis, in the light of two criteria: their political or autobiographical interest; and their degree of reliability, based on a comparison with other Malatesta sources. On the basis of these criteria, for instance, we have included here the hitherto unpublished interrogations of Malatesta during the instruction phase of the April 1898 trial, as well as his speeches during the courtroom proceedings.

With an author like Malatesta, one of the main problems an editor faces is represented by the attribution criteria. The seemingly obvious concept of complete works, as the set of works written in the author’s own hand, whilst valid in theory, is practically inapplicable in Malatesta’s case. The reason is that Malatesta’s writings are to be found mostly in periodicals edited by himself and are most often unsigned. The criterion of assembling only what can be demonstrably attributed to the author’s pen could be rigorously applied only at the cost of unacceptable exclusions that would defeat the very idea of complete works; or else, the pursuit of completeness would run the risk of turning into vaguely formulated and hardly generalizable ad hoc criteria applied on a case-by-case basis, which, in the final analysis, would be tantamount to an arbitrary and subjective selection. The dilemma has been tackled here by broadening the concept of authorship from the narrow meaning set out above to that of intellectual responsibility: when it could not be conclusively demonstrated either that a writing issued from Malatesta’s pen or that it did not, the writing was included if it could be shown that Malatesta made himself its author by taking on responsibility for it and openly acknowledging it as a faithful expressions of his thought. The concept of intellectual responsibility, though seemingly more vague, can actually translate into criteria that are more rigorous and explicit—and at the same time more practicable and less restrictive—than those set by the narrower concept of authorship. In other words, it is often easier to empirically ascertain a writing’s intellectual responsibility than its material authorship.

The basic assumption informing the criterion of intellectual responsibility is simple and is set out by Malatesta himself in L’Agitazione. Commenting on an article that appeared in a review, he notes that, as it was signed by the editorial board, the article can be deemed as having come from the pen of the director, or, at any rate, published under his responsibility. One can legitimately presume that the same criterion applied to other people’s periodicals was all the more applied by Malatesta to his own. Similar to an article signed by an editorial board, it can be presumed, until proven otherwise, that an article published by Malatesta, unsigned and with no accompanying editorial note, in his own political newspapers, was by him, or had at least been read, reviewed, and approved by him, and thus fully reflected his thought. So, with regard to the broad grey area of writings that were carried in Malatesta’s periodicals and for which there is no proof attesting incontrovertibly to their material authorship, the criterion of ascribing the writing to the periodical’s editor becomes decisive.

Obviously this criterion is applicable to differing degrees, varying from paper to paper, depending on the paper’s editorial line-up and the extent of Malatesta’s involvement and freedom of action within the editorial group. In this respect, L’Agitazione is one of Malatesta’s periodicals where unsigned writings can most widely and confidently be credited to him. He was directly involved in the decision to launch that periodical and was responsible for its editing from the outset. Therefore, the periodical definitely bears his imprint. Furthermore, the underground life into which Malatesta was forced for most of the time in question afforded him the opportunity to steadily devote himself to the paper’s editing. The identity of opinions between Malatesta and L’Agitazione was explicitly confirmed in the columns of the paper itself. In response to claims of an alleged change in Malatesta’s tactics, L’Agitazione carried the following Note from the Editors: "Errico Malatesta is one of our contributors and he absolutely upholds the same principles and the same tactics as our newspaper champions. So anybody with an interest in finding out what Malatesta thinks has only to read L’Agitazione. Anyone attributing to him ideas contrary to those of L’Agitazione is telling lies. Again, in his apologia at the April 1898 trial, faced with accusations based upon writings that had appeared in the anarchist press, Malatesta rejected responsibility for writings that had appeared in other papers, while he stated to fully recognize" L’Agitazione as his paper and to accept full responsibility for its whole series.²

Just as the goal of accounting for Malatesta’s thought justifies the inclusion of unsigned texts, it also acts as a filter on the basis of which such texts have been selected, excluding those that have limited value as expressions of thought. As a rule, we excluded columns, such as the ones dealing with the social movement or the anarchist-socialist movement, which are usually compilations of correspondence, extracts from other newspapers, or news items, anyway. More generally, we excluded articles that have mainly an informative nature, rather than of comment or criticism, such as: the frequent updates on the distribution and conditions of anarchists in forced residence; the ones rehashing articles already appeared in the foreign anarchist and socialist press; news stories, such as detailed accounts of police abuses; and items of merely local or fleeting interest, or in which reflection and comment are confined, anyway, to brief remarks restating known concepts thoroughly explored in other articles. The application of these criteria has at all times been tempered by common sense and for every criterion exceptions have been made and explained in footnotes.

In any case, inclusion or exclusion always affects entire articles, thus avoiding the intermediate solution of reprinting articles partially. The only exception has been items that appear in columns that are normally excluded, such as From Letters and Postcards. For example, in the event that a letter signed by Malatesta was published in one of those columns, we have included only the item in question rather than the entire column. Conversely, columns normally included, such as Trifles—once Malatesta took charge of it—have been reprinted in full, including sections that would have been excluded if they had appeared on their own.

Furthermore, when the text by Malatesta consists of an editor’s note to someone else’s article, parts of the article being commented upon have been summarized or omitted, wherever doing so was no impairment to the understanding of Malatesta’s response. The summarized parts are enclosed in square brackets. In general, square brackets always enclose editor’s interventions. We also excluded from other people’s reports of Malatesta’s speeches parts unrelated to the actual report, such as personal comments by the writer. In all cases the omissions have been signalled through the insertion of three spaced dots (. . .) that graphically differ from the ellipsis (…) used in the text by the author.

As for the time span covered by this volume, we decided to slightly bring the starting date forward. Although sparse articles by Malatesta appeared in January 1897, we set the volume’s start to the polemic between Malatesta and Francesco Saverio Merlino, which began between late February and early March 1897, rather than to the beginning of the calendar year. Clearly, the writings from January 1897 have been included in the chronologically preceding volume. The polemic with Merlino constitutes the natural prologue to Malatesta’s time with L’Agitazione, which soon became the forum of that controversy and to which this volume is almost entirely devoted. Indeed, this volume includes the entire period when L’Agitazione was edited by Malatesta, which is to say, from the first issue in March 1897 through to January 1898. With few exceptions, the writings included here are from that periodical.

The texts are laid out in the chronological order in which they were published or written, with the few items that did not appear in L’Agitazione inserted into that periodical’s main sequence. In this way the reader can the more readily understand cross-references between articles, such as Malatesta’s comments in L’Agitazione on an interview that appeared earlier in Avanti. The only exception to the chronological order is serialized articles. In this case follow-up instalments have been added to the opening item, with the transitions between instalments signalled in footnotes. Finally, fragmentary reports and statements that have been excluded from the main body for reasons of brevity or questionable reliability, and that are therefore of merely documentary interest, have been collated in the Press Clippings section.

Malatesta’s works span a period of sixty years and were published in a broad range of publications in many countries and languages. Because of such diversity, we have not attempted to enforce uniformity of stylistic conventions. Rather, in a spirit of documentary editing, we have made an effort to reproduce those works as faithfully as possible. As a rule, unless stylistic changes were required by linguistic or cultural differences between the source language and English (such as, for example, different capitalization conventions), we have preserved typesetting styles from the original sources. Hence what might appear as inconsistencies in the present volume adhere to the original publications.

Rather than indicating by means of notes which articles are signed, the signatures have been placed directly in the text, as they appear in the original text. Therefore, articles without a signature in the text should be considered unsigned. Malatesta’s own footnotes are preceded by the phrase Author’s note in square brackets. All other notes are by the editor.

As we have done for each volume, we have prefaced Malatesta’s texts with an introductory essay by an authoritative scholar in the history of anarchism and Malatesta’s works. Besides setting the historical context, the essay offers an interpretation of Malatesta’s thought and action during the period concerned. In entrusting the introductory essays to a range of scholars, we aim to offer an overview of the critical literature on Malatesta and a sample of possible interpretations of his work. The readers should not expect those interpretations to make up a coherent whole. In this choir there are as many dissonances as harmonies among the various voices. So, we are far from intending to offer any official interpretation that may steer and influence the reading of Malatesta. Rather, if there is any intent in offering dissonant voices, it might be that of stimulating a healthy scepticism. After all, one of the main purposes of this project is to make available to everyone texts hitherto accessible only to a narrow circle of academics and researchers. Readers are therefore encouraged to form their own interpretation of Malatesta on his texts, and subject the introductory essays to a critical scrutiny on the basis of that interpretation.

Finally, I wish to thank Maurizio Antonioli for having given me access to periodicals of the time, Tomaso Marabini for his invaluable help in going through those periodicals, and Barry Pateman for his expert advice about editorial criteria. I also thank Pietro Di Paola, Paolo Finzi, Carl Levy, and the late Nunzio Pernicone for having read and commented upon a preliminary draft of this foreword.

---

1 "List of Political Coatti," p. 166 of this volume.

2 From Letters and Postcards and Court of Ancona: Trial of Malatesta and Co. p. 329 and 447 of this volume, respectively.

Introductory essay: Malatesta, Anarchist Socialism, L’Agitazione, and the Bread Riots

by Roberto Giulianelli

³

1. The background

Errico Malatesta returned to Italy in March 1897. His exile, begun right after the Banda del Matese trial, coincided with the scattering of the First International, in whose name a number of groups and newspapers would carry on operating for many years to come.⁴ After an initial period in the Middle East, Malatesta travelled around Europe, coming into contact with Russian, French, Swiss, Belgian, and English revolutionaries. In July 1881, along with Francesco Saverio Merlino,⁵ he represented Italy at the London Congress, where the strategy of anarchism was thrashed out: the insurrectional option was given priority and anarchism was portrayed as the only genuinely revolutionary movement. From then until the end of the century, anarchism favored individual­istic terrorism as a privileged weapon in its political struggle.⁶

After his participation in Arabi Pasha’s anti-European insurrection in Egypt, and his arrest by the British authorities, Malatesta returned clandestinely to Florence in 1883 with the intention of obstructing Andrea Costa’s parliamentarist turn. He spent several months in jail, charged with armed conspiracy against the State, and on his release published the weekly La Questione Sociale,⁷ the pamphlet Program and Organization of the International Workingmen’s Association, and Between Peasants, unquestionably his best known publication.⁸ Then, dodging a three-year jail term, he left Italy once again, bound this time for Argentina where he would spend the next five years.

By 1889 he was back in Europe, launching the newspaper L’Associazione in Nice, and from its columns he expressed an unprecedented detachment from propaganda by deed. Though partly justifying attacks by anarchists by their being driven to it by a profoundly iniquitous ­socio-economic system,⁹ Malatesta proposed that a libertarianism finding expression in terrorist attacks should be replaced by an organized movement committed to pursuing individual freedom and social justice by means of activity that should never to be at odds with its goals. In order to give substance to this plan, from the summer of 1890 onwards and in close partnership with Merlino, he mooted a national anarchist congress to be held the following year in the Swiss town of Capolago.

At that meeting in January 1891, discussion of a movement that would be organized along federal lines carried the day. The nascent Revolutionary Anarchist Socialist Party was assigned the tasks of working towards a popular insurrection through its propaganda and of being part of it once it erupted. No concessions were made to Costa’s option, a rupture that would be sealed a year later at the Genoa congress. The emerging anarchist party would never submit to the verdict of the ballot-box, just as libertarians would never be counted among the active or passive electorate. Besides, Malatesta had already rejected the voting option in a letter addressed to Andrea Costa on May 16, 1890.¹⁰

The Capolago congress drew an attendance of Italian libertarians that was not merely substantial but also diverse, as witness the presence there of Luigi Galleani, one of the chief exponents of the anti-organizationist current.¹¹ However, the congress proved rather ineffectual when it came to pragmatically defining the project put forward by Malatesta and Merlino. The Revolutionary Anarchist Socialist Party had in fact set itself a universal goal (the social revolution), which was therefore neither bounded by nor applicable to any specific geographical territory. The very ambition of launching a body not territorially bounded ended any realistic chance of the party’s surviving and growing.¹² Failure to agree on high profile issues, such as the stance to be adopted vis à vis socialists and republicans, highlights a further shortcoming of a congress whose outcome would soon be shown to be inconsistent.¹³

The testing ground for the ideas that emerged from Capolago was the gathering on the first of May 1891. At the time, May 1st had a twofold nature: to the reformist socialists it was merely a workers’ holiday, and to the revolutionaries it was a general strike and therefore a subversive opportunity. Anarchists, obviously, tended to embrace the latter interpretation, yet the ineffectuality of the unrest in Paris the previous year had confirmed for Malatesta that the libertarian movement could only capitalize upon that opportunity by organizing.¹⁴ In 1891 Italian anarchism had formally become a party and the streets of May 1st looked like the proper arena for the social revolution.¹⁵

In the weeks following the Capolago congress a few anarchist exponents had busied themselves, especially in the center and south of the country, making preparations for an insurrection. Indeed, in many places, that 1st of May witnessed particularly combative rallies, followed by clashes with the police. The bloodiest incident took place in the Italian capital. Shattered by the crisis triggered by the construction boom of the 1880s, Rome was suffering an economic and social situation, the seriousness of which could be gauged by the large number of unemployed.¹⁶ Amilcare Cipriani’s plea for caution to the crowds that had gathered in the Piazza Santa Croce in Gerusalemme went unheeded. The demonstrators soon clashed with the police, who repeatedly rode across the square, making their way through the crowd with sabres.¹⁷

The insurrection eventually failed, in Rome as elsewhere in the peninsula; and Malatesta’s clandestine tour of Italy that same spring was no more successful. Malatesta visited Tuscany, Emilia Romagna, and Lombardy in a vain effort to pick up the threads of the nascent anarchist party. Upon his arrival in Lugano, on the return leg, he was arrested by the Swiss authorities. By September, he was back in London.¹⁸

May 1, 1891 actually exposed the shortcomings of the experiment started in the 1880s. Much of the Italian anarchist movement had rejected the organizationist turn and even those who were in favor of it had ultimately demonstrated that they were incapable of following through. Between 1892 and 1894, the proliferation of newspapers of an individualist bent as well as isolated groups who prided themselves on their marginalization, shows that a sectarianism that was only partly justified by the police crackdown was still one of the chief identifying features of the anarchist movement.¹⁹ The efforts made by Malatesta and Merlino to provoke a repudiation of the platform ratified in London ten years earlier had been useless. But then again, the sacrifice being asked for was not small: for the active minority—which had felt, since 1881, that it had been invested with the mission of promoting revolution through individual violence and avenging the endless injustices in the world—it amounted to no longer standing in for a working class that was considered still too immature to take full responsibility for its own emancipation. While Europe and the United States registered a proliferation in attacks attributable to propaganda by deed,²⁰ most of the Italian libertarian movement had chosen to reject Malatesta’s approach, adding more fuel to the anarchist–bomber equation that was to tarnish anarchism in the public imagination long after the end of its most frenzied dynamite-throwing days.

With Sicilian Fasci and the riots in Lunigiana, Malatesta suffered an even greater disappointment than the one in 1891. Here too, the plan was to transform incidental agitations, though ones with widespread partici­pation, into social revolution. Given that both Malatesta and Merlino were outside Italy, it fell to Pietro Gori²¹ to conduct most of the propaganda effort in the field by holding talks in a range of cities.²² Towards the end of 1893, convinced that the great day was finally at hand, Malatesta decided to return, taking up quarters in central Italy. Merlino would do the same in the South, while Charles Malato volunteered to be the northern vertex of an imaginary triangle within which the insurrection was to erupt. The plan, of which the Italian authorities immediately got wind, fell through. Nevertheless, in the first days of 1894, Malatesta reached Ancona, one of the cities that had hosted Gori’s talks a few months earlier.²³ There he published the one-off Il Commercio²⁴ (the curious title being an attempt to evade police attention), but above all he wrote an article—Let Us Go to the People—into which, in the wake of the aborted attempt at insurrection, he had poured his disappointment at yet another missed opportunity.

In Let Us Go to the People—published by the Ancona-based paper L’Art. 248²⁵ on February 4, 1894, by which time Malatesta had probably already left Italy—one can find an echo of some of the criticisms that the socialists had been levelling at Italian anarchism since the 1870s, starting with its lack of organizational preparedness and the absence of solid ties to society. The relentless predisposition to internal polemics and to dispersal into tiny groups and short-lived papers living in worlds of their own another charge levelled by Malatesta at a movement that had once again exhibited its oldest shortcomings. During those revolts, they opted for isolation and self-absorption rather than seeking alliances outside their own ideological boundaries and plunging into the simmering realities of Sicily and Lunigiana. Malatesta’s appeal fell on deaf ears, being addressed to an anarchist movement put on the defensive by the repressive measures introduced that summer by the Crispi government.²⁶

In January 1894, Malatesta returned to London where he took part, two years later, in the international socialist congress, a milestone in a process that led to a further revision of his ideas, particularly with regards to the role of the workers’ organs of economic representation. In outlining his biography many years later, Luigi Fabbri went so far as to depict Malatesta as a precursor of libertarian syndicalism;²⁷ it is true, though, that in 1895 Fernand Pelloutier, father of revolutionary syndicalism—indisputably, in this case—claimed that he had borrowed ideas from Malatesta.²⁸ The trade union became truly central to Malatesta’s thinking only in the wake of the London gathering of July–August 1896, while he was very disconsolate about an anarchist movement that looked to him disconnected and moribund.²⁹

Malatesta took part in the London congress by representing Spanish and French workers’ associations. He was flanked by other anarchists, from Pietro Gori to Jean Grave, Louise Michel to Gustav Landauer, Paul Robin to Christian Cornelissen, but the Marxists promptly challenged their presence at this gathering of the Second International and had them removed. A few days after the proceedings, Malatesta, who had been allowed to stay only as a trade union representative, published a one-off edition of L’Anarchia,³⁰ in which he laid out a theoretical revision that sprang from the sight of a libertarian movement by then, in his estimation, marooned in propaganda by deed. In its columns, Malatesta also set about rehashing the ideas expounded by Pouget and Pelloutier at the London congress about direct action, applying these to an Italian anarchist movement that he saw as being squeezed between the Socialist Party, increasingly significant in electoral terms, and the anticipation of a revolution that was not forthcoming. Affinity with revolutionary syndicalism was the overture to a more thoroughgoing overhaul that prompted him to rethink the very notion of revolution, now less of a romantically pictorial phenomenon than a goal to be achieved by gradual steps.³¹

With such thoughts on his mind, Malatesta returned to Italy in early 1897 and settled in Ancona.

2. The choice of Ancona

The choice of the regional capital of the Marches as the operational base for what was to become the most determined attempt at insurrection mounted in Italy in the nineteenth century sprang probably from a number of considerations. For a start, Ancona was a hub of activity—especially in terms of the railway line, which already linked Milan to Apulia—and its position on the Adriatic coast held out the promise of any revolutionary upheaval’s spreading far and wide and, if need be, a ready escape route.

Among the possible reasons Malatesta chose Ancona in 1897, plenty of historians have highlighted the city’s tradition of rebelliousness. In the wake of the Villa Ruffi arrests (August 2, 1874) and the subsequent disbanding of the Marches-Umbria Federation and its two Ancona branches, local internationalism had to wait until the emergence of the Marches Revolutionary Socialist Federation in 1883 before the recovery began.³² In March 1885, the Ancona anarchist group took part, in Forlì, in the resurrection of the Italian wing of the International Workingmen’s Association and then looked after its press organ (Il Paria).³³

Ancona was, therefore, one of the cities in which the internationalist movement had been most speedily and effectively resurrected following the crisis of the 1870s. The focus could be pushed back a further two decades to highlight the fact that, as far back as the immediate wake of Italian unification, the capital city of the Marches region boasted an unbroken anarchist tradition.³⁴ In reality, these reasons are not enough to explain Malatesta’s choice, as he might as easily have chosen a bigger city with a better revolutionary pedigree. It should be kept in mind also that, up until 1896, a large part of the Ancona anarchists still identified with individualism of action, much like the rest of the province and across the Marches region, as evidenced by the six bombs of anarchist provenance that went off in Jesi, Tolentino, Pesaro, and Senigallia between 1891 and 1895. In Ancona, propaganda by the deed had escalated following the January 7, 1894 demonstrations, mounted in solidarity with the revolts in Sicily and Lunigiana.³⁵ The following May, the prefecture estimated that there were around three hundred libertarians active in Ancona,³⁶ without specifying, though, that many of them belonged to the individualist camp. The reaction against the convictions handed down under Crispi’s emergency laws found expression in a few devices that exploded between 1894 and 1895 at a carabinieri barracks, the episcopal seminary, the Casino dorico,³⁷ and the French consulate.

The decline of individualist and anti-organizationist anarchism in Ancona can be traced to a specific date—August 29, 1896—when police raided the premises of the club La Nuova Concordia (formerly known as Studi e Progresso), and discovered chemical reagents meant for bomb-making. Among the dozens of anarchists arrested was eighteen-year-old Augusto Giardini, a future lawyer of high repute, who in 1914 would be a counsel for the defense in the Red Week trial.³⁸ Of the thirty-five club members who appeared in court, nineteen were found guilty of criminal association.³⁹ The sentences, the enforced disbandment of La Nuova Concordia, and the closure of its newspaper (La Lotta Umana)⁴⁰ enabled the anarchist socialist strand to achieve supremacy within the Ancona libertarian movement.

By 1897, Malatesta therefore knew that in Ancona he could count on militants whose pre-eminence among the city’s anarchists had been aided paradoxically by the court’s sentencing a few months earlier. Prominent among them was Cesare Agostinelli, with whom Malatesta had shared the job of gold digger in Patagonia—the most legendary (and uncertain) part of his exile in Argentina. In 1890, Agostinelli took over the administration of the Macerata newspaper La Campana,⁴¹ the national organ of the anarchist socialist current. He was, in addition, a member of the Social Studies Circle that was to play such a significant role in getting Malatesta to come to and settle in Ancona.⁴² A few weeks before the members of La Nuova Concordia were arrested, the Social Studies Circle tried to promote a regional Anarchist Socialist Federation,⁴³ reiterating the attempt made in the wake of the Capolago congress;⁴⁴ over the same weeks, the Circle had also begun reprinting classic works of anarchist thought such as Ferdinand Domela Nieuwenhuis’s Authoritarian Socialism and Libertarian Socialism, Peter Kropotkin’s The Place of Anarchism in Socialist Evolution and Law and Authority, and Malatesta’s Between Peasants and In Time of Elections.⁴⁵

The Social Studies Circle was driven by militants with organizational talents unusual in the anarchist movement. First and foremost, there was Agostinelli, mentioned above. Hatter, ice-cream maker, bird-breeder (he kept a room filled with them), poacher of pigeons from the city squares—when driven to it by hunger,⁴⁶ Agostinelli had a practical turn of mind and a steely determination that made him a great newspaper manager, a role he had already fulfilled at La Campana and would do again, many years later, as the manager of Volontà and Umanità Nova. Next, there was Adelmo Smorti; a key player in the 1880s in the local libertarian movement’s transition from its internationalist phase into its more specifically anarchist one, he would go on to serve as L’Agitazione’s administrator and, thereafter, first secretary of the provincial labor chamber. Then there was Rodolfo Felicioli, a member of the Social Studies Circle leading group from the early 1890s, who went on to join L’Agitazione’s editorial staff and, by the turn of the century, became an active trade unionist.⁴⁷ We might continue this list through names like Romeo Tombolesi, Nazareno Sabini, and Ariovisto Pezzotti,⁴⁸ but above all there was Emidio Recchioni, from Romagna, a man who was able to use his job as a railway-worker to establish links with various anarchist groups throughout the country. In 1897–1898, before his forced residence on Favignana Island, as part of the government’s clampdown after Pietro Acciarito’s attempted assassination of Umberto I, Recchioni was part of L’Agitazione’s editorial staff.

As early as 1894, Recchioni showed his talents as an organizer by helping start L’Art. 248 and supplying the hiding place where Malatesta apparently spent his first short stay in Ancona.⁴⁹ By January 1894, the city had confirmed its disposition to street agitations, and had among its inhabitants a group of anarchist socialists capable, among other things, of putting together a well-produced and widely read newspaper. It is well known that Malatesta’s threefold pattern of activity exhibited in 1913–14—comprising a circle, a newspaper, and an uprising—was a sort of revised version of his 1897–98 action plan.⁵⁰ Not enough stress is laid, though, on the fact that the latter drew in turn its inspiration from what happened in Ancona at the time of the revolts in Sicily and Lunigiana. In 1894, the action conformed to that threefold pattern through the Social Studies Circle, the newspaper L’Art. 248, and the demonstrations of January 7–9; the pattern would be revived, in 1897–98, through Social Studies, L’Agitazione, and the bread riots, and in 1913–14, through Social Studies, Volontà, and the Red Week.

Some of the qualities that made Ancona such a potentially great operational base were embedded in the economic structures of the city where those social and professional strata to which anarchism had always been most alluring were well represented at the time. For a start, there were the port workers, whom historians have long ideologically contrasted with the workers of the local shipbuilding industry: on the one hand, the stevedores, a labor force of long-standing tradition, quarrelsome types split into gangs competing for the best jobs, of individualist tendency and thus bound to anarchism; on the other, a modern socialist labor force, the dockyardmen.⁵¹ The stevedores’ widespread support for the libertarian movement cannot be disputed, and it was not confined to the nineteenth century—as evidenced by the cases of Cesare Alfieri and Raniero Cecili,⁵² who not only were at the head of the stevedores’ cooperatives from the early-twentieth century to the advent of fascism, but were also in the local labor chamber (with a prominent role, in Cecili’s case). Much less clear is the political militancy of the shipyard workers, who, until the end of the First World War, demonstrated an uneven engagement with politics and an inability to organize in trade unions.⁵³

The port workers represented just one of the social constituents of Ancona’s late-nineteenth century anarchism—the noisiest constituent, but not the only or the most important one. Until the latter half of the nineteenth century, when a white collar component was added, Ancona was, to a large extent, a commercial and artisanal city, as it had been since the Middle Ages. It was especially among the petty clerks, but even more so among the small shopkeepers, shoemakers, barbers, and carpenters that the libertarian movement captured its largest numbers of members. The remainder of the grassroots members was made up of railway workers, and it was no accident that, in 1914, their national union headquarters was located in Ancona.⁵⁴

So, Malatesta’s choice of Ancona can be explained by a number of considerations: chief among them, the existence of a sound, organized anarchist socialist group. Then again, the presence of the chief Italian exponent of the libertarian movement would act as an extraordinary driving force for local anarchism, given that in 1897–98 the number of libertarian circles in Ancona’s province soared to thirty, making the Marches Italy’s top region in terms of anarchist group numbers.⁵⁵

3. L’Agitazione: melting pot of ideas, movement bulletin board, mouthpiece for anti-government protests⁵⁶

Malatesta’s plan was to operate underground in Ancona, with a fake name (Giuseppe Rinaldi) and a few disguises,⁵⁷ though it is hard to believe he could have misled the forces of order. I have been in Italy for several months Malatesta himself disclosed in September 1897, I am living in places where the government knows no anarchists and among people whom it counts perhaps as its friends, and I could remain there indefinitely, running no risk of falling into the clutches of the dumb Italian police.⁵⁸ In all likelihood, the authorities were not much committed to tracking him down and when they eventually caught him in that fall, they had no option but to release him, as there were no charges or pending suits against him.⁵⁹

In terms of its ultimate goal (revolution), Malatesta’s 1897 program represented no break with the past. Indeed, the means of propaganda were the usual ones: public speeches and, above all, the press. And so, L’Agitazione started publication in March; in terms of circulation (seven thousand copies per issue, distributed mostly in central Italy)⁶⁰ and longevity (its first series ran for fourteen months, despite repeated confiscations)⁶¹ it was to be a unique success story on the nineteenth-century anarchist scene.

The real novelty in the political project tried out in Ancona over those months lay in the tactics used. Bringing to a head considerations he had been working on since the 1880s, Malatesta once and for all rejected any sort of historical determinism (Marx) or naturalistic determinism (Kropotkin), asserting the primacy of the human will in the resolution of the social problem. The people must see to their own emancipation, he wrote in the first issue of L’Agitazione.⁶² The subtitle Anarchist-Socialist Periodical across the masthead served as a premise to the idea of a movement that, in order to avoid lapsing back into the mistakes of the past, was above all to engage in dialogue with the other popular forces.⁶³ All or nearly all of us are communists, we read in an August 1897 issue of the Ancona paper, however, in everything relative to our practical activity, we prefer the designation anarchist socialists, which has the advantage of not prejudging anything and of opening up our ranks to all who seek the abolition of private property and the State.⁶⁴

The anarchist movement had to work out an internal structure and convince itself that, when the libertarian society came about, it would be an organized society.⁶⁵ Hence Malatesta tried to build an Italian anarchist socialist federation whose course of action had already been sketched in Capolago: after being discussed at the Romagna regional congress in December 1897, the federation plan had to be shelved in the wake of the bread riots.⁶⁶

Laying the emphasis on organization also meant widening and rendering unbridgeable the gulf dividing anarchist socialism from individualism.⁶⁷ In an interview with Giuseppe Ciancabilla for Avanti!,⁶⁸ Malatesta renewed his call for libertarians to band together as a party, but said that the enduring absence of such a party was because of the strenuous refusal of the individualists, whose terrorist activities showed no decline over those months, as evidenced by the Acciarito attack⁶⁹ and the killing of the Spanish prime minister Antonio Cánovas del Castillo by Michele Angiolillo.⁷⁰ Deploring these deeds, as well as the Corpus Christi procession outrage in Barcelona,⁷¹ L’Agitazione was to embark upon a heated controversy with the Messina-based weekly L’Avvenire Sociale, which in those months set itself up in Italy as the representative of the anti-organizationist current.⁷² Though he amply granted extenuating circumstances to the assailants, Malatesta noted the individual deeds’ self-damaging import for anarchism, which he wished to see opening up more and more to the outside world, that is, to a public opinion that needed be won over to its ideas.⁷³

Even firmer were Malatesta’s grounds for condemning the Candia expedition to which a group of anarchists (among others) had enthusiastically signed up in March 1897 to fight, under the command of Ricciotti Garibaldi, at the side of the Greeks in the war against the Ottoman Empire.⁷⁴ Malatesta upbraided Cipriani—who had depicted that military confrontation as a veritable people’s revolution—for having naively embraced a cause that might lead, at best, to the replacement of an oppressive government (the Turkish one) by another (the Greek one) no less authoritarian.⁷⁵ Nevertheless, L’Agitazione reported the conflict sympathetically, hailing the Italian fallen as our comrades.⁷⁶

Just as at the beginning of the decade, the goal of turning anarchism from a movement into a party did not lead Malatesta to renounce the abstentionist stance. The polemic with Merlino, in view of the upcoming political elections of March 1897, gave him the chance to clarify matters. We need not discuss in detail a controversy that has been amply covered by historians,⁷⁷ but suffice it to say that, on the eve of the elections, Merlino sent a letter to the director of Il Messaggero announcing that he planned to vote. His declaration—besides marking the Neapolitan lawyer’s departure from the anarchist side and his landing on the socialist one—carried a patent intention of criticizing the anarchist formula according to which parliaments and governments, no matter how made up, are all equally oppressive. Malatesta answered his old friend from the columns of the same Rome paper, then the debate shifted to Avanti! and finally to L’Agitazione, where it was to carry on well past the date of the elections.

In 1897, Merlino and Malatesta agreed that the liberal system, undermined by the defeat at Adowa and the resultant downfall of Crispi, was approaching a turning point. Merlino imagined that turning point would lead to the broader electoral involvement of the lower classes and a truly democratic government, which would not be the absolutely best option, but would be preferable in any case to a messianic wait for the revolution. As ever, Malatesta confided instead in an upheaval that would unfold through a spontaneous mass uprising, without any parliamentary mediation. Committed to this perspective, on the eve of polling day, L’Agitazione published an abstentionist manifesto that caused quite a stir across Italy.⁷⁸ Malatesta’s repudiation of the ballot box also extended to the ploy of protest candidacies, backed by the socialists (as well as by Merlino) as a way of rescuing militants of popular parties from jail and forced residence.⁷⁹

While highlighting a number of fundamental ideological and strategic differences, Malatesta expressed his conviction that there were important points of contact between anarchism and the Italian Socialist Party, starting with their common battle against the capitalist system. Though the two movements could not find a common ground in the electoral struggle, economic and labor struggles offered such an opportunity. Hence, Malatesta encouraged anarchists to promote resistance societies and worked concretely to create the bodies that were to constitute the first trade union flourishing in Ancona.⁸⁰ He also highlighted the importance of the strike as a trigger of the virtuous circle that would lead to a popular uprising. After the disappointing experiences of the start of the decade, the 1st of May began to seem again like a potentially revolutionary event,⁸¹ or at least a valuable opportunity for anarchism and the broader labor movement to come together.⁸²

4. The riots of ’98 and their consequences

Three things about the bread riots need emphasizing. The first relates to timing: the revolt in Ancona (January 17–18) preceded the better-known and more tragic May events by four months.

Secondly, the police and local authorities did not hesitate to blame the anarchists for organizing and leading the riots. In reality, the crowd that hailed the social revolution in January was not made up exclusively, or even chiefly of libertarian movement militants, but Malatesta and the Social Studies Circle were identified as having chief political responsibility for the revolt.⁸³

The third point is that the revolts at the end of the century and, even more, the trial mounted against the Ancona anarchist group, offered Malatesta and the then-young Luigi Fabbri an opportunity to start a friendship that would last for over thirty years. As a student at the law school of Macerata, Fabbri was already an organizer of subversive circles and newspapers⁸⁴ and had met Malatesta a few months earlier, with Agostinelli as a go-between.⁸⁵ After the bread riots, the arrest of a large part of L’Agitazione’s editorial group would have led to the paper’s folding, if Nino Samaja⁸⁶—a doctor from Romagna who managed to elude the police—had not taken it upon himself to keep up publication, with help from Fabbri and other militants. Fabbri closely followed the April 1898 trial,⁸⁷ and L’Agitazione offered detailed coverage by printing a daily supplement that achieved the exceptional circulation of eight thousand copies.

Just as he had done in Benevento in 1878 and in Florence in 1884, and as he would do in Milan about the Diana theater outrage, in Ancona too Malatesta avoided turning the proceedings into a trial against anarchism.⁸⁸ Thus he did not turn the court into a showcase for the libertarian cause, but rather aimed at circumscribing the anarchists’ role in the bread riots. The defense strategy espoused by the lawyers representing L’Agitazione—Gori, Merlino, and Enrico Ferri—managed to keep the sentencing down to a few months in prison.⁸⁹ Within days of the verdict, the same paper—which was the real accused in the Ancona trial⁹⁰—issued a declaration of solidarity with the convicted men, signed by three thousand Italian anarchists.⁹¹

After serving his sentence, Malatesta was not freed, but was sent into forced residence on Ustica Island and then on to Lampedusa Island. This further restrictive measure was part of the special punitive actions taken by the government against anarchists, socialists, and republicans on account of the fin de siècle riots. During those months, the Italian archipelagos received hundreds of libertarians, including many members of L’Agitazione’s editorial staff. The newspaper—as the other anarchist periodical—was suppressed by the authorities on May 9, 1898.⁹² Samaja eluded arrest by fleeing to France, but Fabbri was arrested in Macerata, jailed, and then taken to Ponza and thereafter to Favignana, where he was to stay until the autumn of 1900.⁹³

In April 1899, Malatesta escaped from Lampedusa. He managed to reach Tunis and then Malta, London, and, eventually, New York.⁹⁴ A long period in exile was beginning again for him and it would not end until 1913, when he returned to Ancona to, once again, throw himself into another insurrectional attempt. Malatesta was welcomed by the reconstituted Social Studies group and some old comrades such as Agostinelli, Smorti, Felicioli and, above all, Fabbri, who, now an elementary school teacher, managed to have his job transferred from the schools of Crespellano, near Bologna, to Fabriano where he could contribute, at close quarters, to the new publication launched in Ancona (Volontà).⁹⁵ The rebirth of the Social Studies group, following the fin de siècle turmoil, was also due to the activism of militants who had not had a hand in the bread riots. One of them was Alberigo Angelozzi.

A republican in his youth, Angelozzi had been drawn to anarchism through the end of the century agitations, following which he had come into contact with what was left of the city’s libertarian group. In March 1900, L’Agitazione resumed publication,⁹⁶ mainly thanks to his and Giardini’s work. That April, however, Giardini was arrested and subsequently convicted for his activities in connection with the Ancona paper. In December, it was Angelozzi’s turn to be convicted to a fifteen month jail term. In 1902, he replaced Smorti as secretary of the Ancona labor chamber, a commitment to which, in the following years, he added the foundation of some libertarian groups and two fairly significant newspapers (La Vita Operaia and Lo Sprone).⁹⁷ In 1912, in search of work, Angelozzi relocated to Paris with his family, but by January 1914 (or perhaps earlier) he was back in Ancona, flanking Malatesta in the intense propaganda activity underway at that point.⁹⁸

Angelozzi’s political trajectory over the fifteen years between the bread riots and the Red Week highlights the legacy of Malatesta’s experiment at the end of the nineteenth century. It was a legacy that can be summed up by the term organization, sometimes taking the form of a new periodical, or a new circle, or indeed that of the Ancona Anarchist Socialist Federation, founded in the summer of 1901 without ever actually becoming operational;⁹⁹ other times, it took the form of a particularly combative syndicalism.

Moving along the path outlined by Malatesta and L’Agitazione—in keeping with which the anarchists engaged during 1897–98 in promoting resistance societies—at the start of the twentieth century, the Ancona libertarian group, reinvigorated by the return of its chief exponents from forced residence, had a leading role in the birth of the local labor chamber. Not only did the anarchists join it, but they actually gained control over it, thanks to an alliance with the Italian Republican Party, which left the socialists in the minority. The anarchists had its leadership for three years,¹⁰⁰ after which time frictions with the republicans led to a temporary stop in an experiment that was to be renewed. Indeed, in Ancona the libertarian movement was to retain a marked vocation for trade union work, as witness publication of the abovementioned newspaper La Vita Operaia (Workers’ life)—a paper whose title was both evocative and programmatic—and the practical action carried out within the labor chamber and in some trades federations by militants such as Felicioli and Pezzotti.

There is a quite widely held but unconvincing notion that the reason anarchism engaged increasingly with trade union activity—in Ancona and in other Italian cities as well—can be traced back to the failure of the bread riots and to the defensive position into which the libertarian movement was forced up until the eve of the Great War. The fact is that, at that time, Ancona’s anarchists appear to have been Malatesta’s followers despite Malatesta, in that they kept at the helm of syndicalism in the face of their comrade’s changed outlook,¹⁰¹ in which the old insurrectionism picked up again in the early-twentieth century and the political ground regained the ascendancy over the economic one.¹⁰²

Throughout the final decade of the century, anarchy prevails over anarchism or anarchism dissolves into anarchy,¹⁰³ writes Pier Carlo Masini, remarking how the only exception to this general rule was Ancona. It is worth adding that such exceptionality was not erased by the bread riots and the ensuing convictions that dispersed such a significant part of the libertarian movement.

As you may have seen [Felicioli wrote to one militant in the spring of 1897] our organization has already given results: the publication of the newspaper and the splendid demonstration, recently held, during the election period.

The driver behind the organization is the newspaper… The program advocated by L’Agitazione aims at the union of all our forces, so that we may then agree to implement, wherever and as best we may, the more interesting part of our program, which is the struggle… on the economic terrain.

Strive to organize a sound group in your locality, infiltrate associations with an eye to spreading our ideas, encourage and involve yourself in every agitation of interest to the working class. These are the means whereby we can win the people’s favor.¹⁰⁴

The successes of 1897–98 were to be unrepeatable for anarchism in Ancona, and Malatesta’s enforced relocation and the shutting down of a periodical as significant as L’Agitazione dealt a very severe blow to the region.¹⁰⁵ Yet, the roots of the experience lived at the close of the nineteenth century retain sufficient viability to induce Malatesta himself to settle in Ancona again in 1913 and to try from there—one more time and again without success—to make the revolution blossom.

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3 Roberto Giulianelli is associate professor in Economic History with the Università Politecnica delle Marche. His publications on the history of the workers’ and anarchist movements include: Pier Carlo Masini, storico e giornalista 1945–1957 (Bergamo, 2004); ed. Luigi Fabbri. Studi e documenti sull’anarchismo fra Otto e Novecento (Pisa, 2005); ed. Epistolario. Ai corrispondenti italiani ed esteri (1900–1935), by Luigi Fabbri (Pisa, 2005); ed. (with M. Antonioli) Da Fabriano a Montevideo. Luigi Fabbri: vita e idee di un intellettuale anarchico e antifascista (Pisa, 2006); ed. (with M. Papini) Dizionario biografico del movimento sindacale nelle Marche, 1900–1970 (Rome, 2006); Un eretico in paradiso. Ottorino Manni: anticlericalismo e anarchismo nella Senigallia del primo Novecento (Pisa, 2007); L’industria carceraria in Italia. Lavoro e produzione nelle prigioni da Giolitti a Mussolini (Milan, 2008).

4 P. C. Masini, Gli internazionalisti. La Banda del Matese (1876–1878) (Milan–Rome: Edizioni Avanti!, 1958), 128. [Editor’s note: the Matese band was a group of Internationalists, led by Malatesta and Carlo Cafiero, who, in April 1877, roamed the countryside around the Matese mountain range, near Benevento, trying to spark a peasant uprising. At the trial of August 1878 they were acquitted.]

5 For an outline of the life of Francesco Saverio Merlino, see the entry under his name by G. Berti in Dizionario biografico degli anarchici italiani (hereafter DBAI), eds. M. Antonioli, G. Berti, P. Iuso, and S. Fedele, vol. 2 (Pisa: BFS, 2004).

6 G. Berti, Errico Malatesta e il movimento anarchico italiano e internazionale, 1872–1932 (Milan: Franco Angeli, 2003), 90–99.

7 An anarchist communist organ, La Questione Sociale was published from December 1883 until February 1884. Then, after a short suspension, the weekly resumed publication until August 1884 under Malatesta’s editorship.

8 G. Berti, Malatesta, Errico, in DBAI, vol. 2, 59.

9 With respect to political terrorism, Malatesta expressed opinions that were on occasion ambiguous, as in the case of Ravachol. Cf., in particular, his letter to Luisa Pezzi of 29 April 1892 (L. Gestri, Dieci lettere inedite di Cipriani, Malatesta e Merlino, Movimento Operaio e Socialista, no 4. [1971]: 325­–28, which can also be found in R. Bertolucci [ed.], Errico Malatesta. Espistolario: lettere edite ed inedite, 1873–1932 [Avenza: Centro Studi Sociali, 1984], 65–68) and the interview that Malatesta gave to Le Figaro reporter Jules Huret in 1893 (cited and commented upon in A. Borghi, Errico Malatesta in 60 anni di lotte anarchiche. Storia-critica-ricordi [Pescara: Samizdat 1999; originally published in 1933], 64–66). For a more comprehensive consideration of this aspect of Malatesta’s thinking, see G. Berti, Il pensiero anarchico dal Settecento al Novecento (Manduria–Bari–Rome: Lacaita 1998), 402–7.

10 G. Cerrito, Andrea Costa nel socialismo italiano (Rome: La Goliardica, 1982), 442–43.

11 P. C. Masini, Storia degli anarchici italiani. Da Bakunin a Malatesta (1862–1892) (Milan: Rizzoli, 1969), 241. On Galleani, on whom much has been written, see M. Scavino’s biographical entry in DBAI, vol. 1 (Pisa: BFS 2003), 654–57.

12 Berti, Errico Malatesta e il movimento anarchico, 169.

13 E. Santarelli, Il socialismo anarchico in Italia (Milan: Feltrinelli, 1973), 79–80.

14 Berti, Errico Malatesta e il movimento anarchico, 159.

15 M. Antonioli, Vieni o maggio. Aspetti del Primo maggio in Italia tra Otto e Novecento (Milan: Franco Angeli, 1988), 49.

16 Cf. L. Cafagna, Anarchismo e socialismo a Roma negli anni della ‘febbre edilizia’ e della crisi, 1882–1891, Movimento Operaio, no. 5 (1952): 729–88.

17 Masini, Storia degli anarchici italiani. Da Bakunin a Malatesta, 259.

18 Berti, Errico Malatesta e il movimento anarchico, 177.

19 Ibid., 206.

20 The relationship between anarchism and violence in the late 19th century has been studied by many historians. For Italy in particular, see P. C. Masini, Storia degli anarchici italiani nell’epoca degli attentati (Milan: Rizzoli, 1981) and M. Antonioli, L’individualismo anarchico, in M. Antonioli and P. C. Masini, Il Sol dell’avvenire. L’anarchismo in Italia dalle origini alla prima guerra mondiale (Pisa: BFS, 1999). For a geographically wider focus see, among others, P. Adamo (ed.) Pensiero e dinamite. Gli anarchici e la violenza, 1892–1894 (Milan: M&B Publishing, 2004).

21 On Gori, see M. Antonioli’s biographical entry in DBAI, vol. 1, 745–51, and references therein.

22 N. Dell’Erba, Giornali e gruppi anarchici in Italia (1892–1900) (Milan: Franco Angeli, 1983), 35.

23 On June 5, 1893 Gori spoke at the Politeama Goldoni in Ancona, expounding anarchism’s theoretical postulates (Scritti scelti di Pietro Gori, vol. 1 [Cesena: Antistato, 1968], 105–25).

24 L. Bettini, Bibliografia dell’anarchismo, vol. 1, part 1, Periodici e numeri unici anarchici in lingua italiana pubblicati in Italia (1872–1971) (Florence: CP, 1972), 120.

25 Nine issues of L’Art 248 appeared between January and March 1894 (Bettini, 119–120).

26 For a detailed listing of the emergency laws passed in 1894, see E. Sernicoli, L’anarchia e gli anarchici. Studio storico e politico, vol. 2 (Milan: Treves. 1894), 263–68.

27 Luigi Fabbri, Malatesta. L’uomo e il pensiero (Naples: RL, 1951), 185.

28 F. Pelloutier, La situation actuelle du socialisme, Temps Nouveaux, July 6, 1895.

29 See the letter of March 10, 1896 from London to Niccolò Converti, in E. Malatesta, Scritti scelti (Naples: RL, 1954), 167–68, reprinted in Bertolucci, 74–75.

30 Berti, Errico Malatesta e il movimento anarchico, 180–87.

31 Masini, Storia degli anarchici italiani nell’epoca degli attentati, 83–83.

32 E. Santarelli, Le Marche dall’Unità al fascismo. Democrazia repubblicana e movimento socialista (Rome: Editori Riuniti, 1961), 102–4.

33 Il Paria began publication in April 1885, breaking off the following November, only to resume sporadically until March 1887 (Bettini, 38).

34 Santarelli, Socialismo anarchico, 89.

35 Santarelli, Le Marche dall’Unità al fascismo, 151.

36 Dell’Erba, 54.

37 [Editor’s note] The Casino dorico was a club where Ancona’s aristocracy traditionally held conferences, parties, masked balls, and musical entertainment.

38 On Giardini, see the biographical entries by M. Antonioli in DBAI (vol. 1, 711–13) and by R. Giulianelli in N. Sbano (ed.), Dizionario degli avvocati di Ancona (Ancona: Il Lavoro Editoriale, 2009), 157–61.

39 R. Giulianelli, La prigione, discriminante esistenziale e politica. L’esperienza di Luigi Fabbri e Augusto Giardini (1894–1902), in edited volume Luigi Fabbri. Studi e documenti sull’anarchismo tra Otto e Novecento, Quaderni della Rivista storica dell’anarchismo, no. 1 (Pisa: BFS, 2005), 31–32.

40 The fortnightly Lotta Umana was very short-lived, producing a bare five issues—including the initial dry run—between April and July 1896 (Bettini, 124–25). In the spring of the same year Ancona’s anarchists also printed off three single issue publications, I Tempi Nuovi, L’Errore Gudiziario, and L’Ora Sanguinosa, all of them of an anti-organizationist bent (Ibid., 124 and 127).

41 For La Campana, see Bettini, 71–72 and V. Gianangeli (ed.). Bibliografia della stampa operaia e democratica nelle Marche, 1860–1926: Periodici e numeri unici della provincia di Macerata (Ancona: Il Lavoro Editoriale, 1998), 87–91. The result of an initiative by some young Macerata anarchists, the newspaper took little time to achieve a print-run of two thousand copies. This success created some problems for local libertarians who—reporting the lack of a press capable of meeting the print-run required—handed the weekly over to the Ancona group in October 1890. In actual fact, the handing-over was demanded by Malatesta and Merlino, in order to give a sharper edge to the paper in view of the upcoming Capolago congress, following which the editorship was handed back to Macerata.

42 For Agostinelli’s relations with Malatesta and, above all, his role in Ancona anarchism between the 19th and 20th centuries, see U. Fedeli, Momenti e uomini del sociaismo-anarchico in Italia. 1896–1924, Volontà, no. 10 (1960): 608–19.

43 R. Felicioli and A. Smorti to a person unknown, Ancona, 16 July 1897, Ancona State Archives, Tribunale di Ancona, Processi penali, 1897, folder 656.

44 Within weeks of the gathering in Switzerland, the press carried the announcement of a congress at which an Umbria-Marches Anarchist Socialist Federation was to be launched (Federazione socialista rivoluzionaria anarchica italiana. Sezione marchigiana-umbra, La Campana, 8 February 1891; Congresso regionale socialista anarchico marchigiano-umbro, Ibid., 18 April 1891). A reference to this project, which came to nothing, can also be found in a letter from Malatesta to Merlino, dated 29 February 1891 (Bertolucci, 61).

45 P. C. Masini, Malatesta vivo, part 3, Volontà, no. 8 (1949), 429; Dell’Erba, 88–89. [Editor’s note: in the English-speaking world, Malatesta’s In Time of Elections is better known through a free adaptation entitled Vote What For?]

46 Luce Fabbri, Luigi Fabbri, storia d’un uomo libero (Pisa: BFS, 1996), 105.

47 For these three figures, see R. Giulianelli’s respective entries in DBAI and in Dizionario biografico del movimento sindacale nelle Marche (hereafter DBMSM) edited by R. Giulianelli and M. Papini (Rome: Ediesse, 2006).

48 For Tombolesi and Sabini see the respective profiles by P. Dipaola and L. Febo in DBAI; for Pezzotti, see those by R. Giulianelli in DBAI and DMBSM.

49 P. Dipaola, sub voce Recchioni, Emidio, DBAI, vol. 2.

50 P. C. Masini, Malatesta vivo, part 1, Volontà, no. 4–5