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
