The objective of this study is to rethink and reinterpret the crisis of liberal Italy through a critical analysis of monetary and financial policy from 1914 to 1922. A complete discussion of all aspects of the collapse of the liberal regime lies beyond the scope of this work. However, the evidence and arguments presented here offer a new perspective on the two major interpretive traditions of the crisis of parliamentary government and the rise of fascism in Italy, namely liberalism and Marxism.

Salvemini and the liberal tradition

As was noted at the end of chapter 7, apologists of Mussolini's regime in the 1920s and 1930s claimed that the March on Rome rescued Italy from Bolshevik revolution and economic and financial collapse; it was there fore only natural for non-fascists to rebut what fairly can be called the regime's founding myths.

The tone of liberal historiography was set by Gaetano Salvemini, an historian and anti-fascist activist in exile, who in a series of books and articles published in the 1920s and 1930s directed much of his attention to refuting the fascists' contentions that socialist revolution was imminent in post-war Italy, and that the Italian economy and Italian state finances were on the verge of collapse. The pervasiveness of Salvemini's influence among non-Marxist anti-fascist historians was underscored recently by the publication of Paolo Frascani's study of post-World-War-I state finances in Italy – the only recent study on this subject – which essentially reconfirms Salvemini's positions.