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Pioneering aviator, blackshirt leader, colonial governor, confidante and heir-apparent to Benito Mussolini, the dashing and charismatic Italo Balbo exemplified the ideals of Fascist Italy during the 1920s and 1930s. He first earned national notoriety immediately after World War I as a violent and ruthless squadrista whose blackshirt forces crushed the socialist and trade union organizations around his native Ferrara.

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Italo Balbo: A Fascist Life

University of California Press

On June 28, 1940, about 5:30 in the afternoon, two aircraft approached the heavily fortified Italian military base at Tobruk in eastern Libya, not far from the Egyptian border. The sun was still high. The crews manning the anti-aircraft batteries around the harbor watched the intruders apprehensively. World War II was barely three weeks old and most of the gunners were inexperienced. A few minutes earlier, nine British bombers, in waves of three, had roared in from Egypt, attacked a local airfield, and disappeared again in the direction of the sun. The anti-aircraft crews could hear sirens; they saw and smelled the smoke from burning aircraft and from an exploding fuel dump. For all the gunners knew, the two aircraft, now approaching from the diretion of the sun, were the enemy returning for another pass. The lead aircraft, flying low, provided a tempting target. In the confusion, few noted that it was a trimotornot like the British twin-engine bombers. An edgy gunner fired a few rounds. Others followed. The lead aircraft was now in trouble. The pilot approached the runway as if to land. The target was too easy, even for the excited gunners. A shell hit the big bomber squarely. Pouring smoke and flames, the aircraft veered to its left, crashed onto a bank above the harbor, and exploded. A cheer went Up from he anti-aircraft crewsthey'd bagged one! A few moments later they learned the identity of their quarry: air marshal Italo Balbo, their commander in chief and a national hero. He was barely forty-four.

The official announcement of the incident consisted of two sentences. The communiqu stressed that "during an enemy bombing action" the aircraft piloted by Italo Balbo crashed in flames. To go down in a blaze of glory, fighting for his country, seemed an appropriate end for a soldier, aviator, patriot. For nearly two decades he had personified the fascist hero, the man of action who believed in always leading from the front. As details became available on the grapevine, however, those who knew Balbo well became more and more skeptical about the official story. "To get himself killed in that way on a sort of family outing," mused a friend, referring to the entourage of Balbo's family and friends who perished with him in the crash, "and the English say that he was killed by the Italians, not in combat. Why?"1 Was hesurrounded by relatives and friendson that last flight fleeing to Egypt to set up a government in exile? How could the Italian batteries have failed to recognize a trimotor? Had Mussolini set up the whole affair to eliminate a rival? Even those who rejected the more fanciful interpretations of the incident wondered. Balbo was an experienced pilot and war veteran. How had he gotten himself into such a dangerous and foolish situation? With all its ironies and tragicomic aspects, Balbo's flaming death over Tobruk was very much in tune with his lifehis "fascist" life.

Balbo was from Ferrara, and proud of it. In the shadow of this splendid but faded Renaissance town, in the suburb of Quartesana, he was born on June 5, 1896.2 Ferrara lies at the southeastern edge of the lush, monotonous Emilian plain of Northern Italy. The lagoons of Venice are located a little more than 100 kilometers to the northeast; the red-tiled roofs and towers of Bologna lie 50 kilometers to the southwest. The countryside is fiat, marshy, and fertile, the fruit of a century of reclamation efforts. As the Po reaches the area around Ferrara, it opens into a delta before spilling into the Adriatic. Poplars, aspens, and willows mark the course of irrigation ditches, canals, and shipping channels. South of the city, toward the Adriatic, lie the valli of the Comacchio, great lagoons where armies of fishermen catch eels during their spring and autumn migrations.

Like so many other cities of the Emilia, Ferrara reached its

greatest glory during the Renaissance, when the city numbered 100,000 and ranked with Florence, Milan, and Venice. Under the patronage of the Estes, Ferrara boasted one of the most brilliant courts of the era. Here Lodovico Ariosto composed his knightly epic Orlando Furioso , and Torquato Tasso his Gerusalemme Liberata . Borso d'Este built his Palazzo Schifanoia, ornamented with the allegorical frescoes of Francesco Cossa. Isabella d'Este commissioned leading painters to decorate her celebrated grotto. Lucrezia Borgia took as her third husband Alfonso I, son of Ercole I d'Este; Girolamo Savonarola, although he achieved his notoriety in Florence, was one of Ferrara's native sons.

Once the Renaissance faded, Ferrara went into decline and never regained its brilliance. Little wonder, then, that throughout his lifetime many viewed Balbo as a reincarnation of the city's past glories. His "court" of devoted friends, his patronage of the arts, his daring feats as a soldier and aviator, his marriage to a titled woman, his natural dignity and charm, all gave him the aura of a Renaissance prince or condottiero . "Dress Balbo in sixteenth-century armor, put him at the head of a band of daredevil horsemen, and he would look as if he had been taken live from Del Cossa's paintings in the Schifanoia Palace," rhapsodized a local admirer.3 "A reincarnation of the militant and magnificent Italian princes of medieval days," concluded an English journalist in 1937.4

Princes were not the rule in Balbo's immediate family, however; schoolteachers were. Both his parents taught school and his birthplace was literally the schoolhouse of Quartesana. Thus, like many of the fascist gerarchi , Balbo was petty bourgeois. His parents' background indicates that their families had once occupied a higher position on the social scale. Through a series of misfortunes, especially to Balbo's father, the family had fallen on hard times. Much of Balbo's career was devoted to regaining that lost social status.

Balbo's father, Camillo (1855-1931), came from a Piedmontese family with a long military tradition. He liked to entertain his children with stories of his maternal grandfather, who had fought with Murat and the Italian army in Russia and had participated in Napoleon's retreat across the Beresina in 1812; another ancestor had served as a general in the Piedmontese army. Camillo himself had aspired to a military career, but when his father, a physician

in a small community of the Monferrato area east of Turin, suffered a fatal fall from a horse, the son was forced to support the family. Instead of a soldier, Camillo became a schoolmaster.

"Bony and wiry, all nerves and imperious will, tenacious, unswerving in his attitudes and ideas, in the faithfulness of his friendships," so a friend remembered Camillo.5 "It's necessary to do, to act, to move," Camillo often exclaimed.6 Much of this nervous energy he channelled into politics. In harmony with his monarchist and liberal convictions, he founded the Circolo Monarchico "Umberto I"; he contributed anti-socialist and anti-clerical articles to local newspapers; he earned a reputation for fiery political oratory. Into his home he brought a strong sense of order, discipline, duty, and patriotism. His love of country was such that he planned to name his first...