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
