Fascist martyrs

During the birth and spread of the fascist movement, its theoreticians argued that a civil war was underway, for which the responsibility would derive from the anti-national drift of the proletariat during Biennio Rosso.

[1] The breakdown of legality, by the successful holding of the March on Rome, would have confirmed the revolutionary nature of the advent of fascism, qualifying as martyrdom the deaths of its adherents during the previous period of turmoil: in fact, during the two-year legalitarian period (1922–1924), precisely because he was President of the Council of Ministers of the Kingdom of Italy according to the statutory order, Benito Mussolini endorsed the rhetoric of "martyrs" to keep alive the pseudo-revolutionary narrative of his coming to power.

[2][3] Therefore, on 30 November 1922, only a month after Benito Mussolini seized power after the March on Rome, it was decreed that each city or town should establish an avenue or park of Remembrance, with a new tree for each fallen in the town during the Great War: shortly afterwards the number was extended to all "fascist martyrs," and by 1925 they amounted to about 400 names.

"[11] On 24 May 1933, on the occasion of the ceremony of the entry into the war in World War I, the governor of Rome Francesco Boncompagni Ludovisi together with the vice-governor laid laurel wreaths at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier and at the Altar of the Fascist Fallen on the Capitol; then the president of the Senate of the Kingdom Luigi Federzoni laid a laurel wreath on the Altar of the Fascist Fallen on behalf of Parliament.

[13] On 5 December 1932, to close the decennial events, the President of the Senate of the Kingdom Luigi Federzoni along with all senators paid their respects at the Fascist Martyrs' Chapel at the Palazzo del Littorio, then the headquarters of the National Fascist Party.