ABSTRACT
The province of Bologna provides an ideal setting for exploring the changing relationship between landownership and power in modern Italy. Nestling at the foot of the Apennine mountains in the southeastern sector of the fertile Po Valley, the city of Bologna was the acknowledged, if unofficial, capital of agricultural Italy; the province and the surrounding region of Emilia constituted one of the country’s most advanced agricultural areas.1 As a result, developments in Bologna reflected the larger stresses and strains of rapid but uneven industrialization and political democratization on the peninsula during the first three decades of the twentieth century. Bologna’s farm labour unions were the largest and most powerful in the entire country and made the province an early stronghold of the socialist movement. The provincial elite of large landowners and commercial farmers took the lead in founding strong employer organizations and provided both the personnel and the ideas for agrarian interest-group associations that arose at the regional and national levels after 1901. The ensuing confrontation between the propertied classes and organized labour made the province a focal point of social and political conflict in Italy prior to 1914. But above all, Bologna was the cradle of the rural-based fascism that elevated Mussolini’s marginal extremist movement into a dominant force on the Italian political scene after the First World War.
