Tuscan fascism began as a small band of anti-socialist vigilantes in the murky backwaters of Florentine politics in 1919 and 1920. In 1921, in the wake of the attempt by the left to overturn the existing structures of power, Mussolini's movement expanded dramatically and in geometric progression throughout the region. Imitating methods first tested in Trieste, Ferrara, and Bologna, the Tuscan fascists destroyed the socialist and Catholic unions as effective political forces before the end of the year. In the process the fasci di combattimento acquired a mobilized political following, a powerful paramilitary organization, substantial sources of finance, and a thick network of party branches. In 1922 the Tuscan fascists were in a position to sieze local power and to lay the local foundations for the October coup d'état.

The meteoric rise of the extreme right was no accident or ‘parenthesis’ in Tuscan history. Such a description could be applied accurately to fascism in the South of Italy. In the Mezzogiorno, with the exception of Apulia, fascism was a sickly and transplanted growth, an offshoot of the success of the movement elsewhere. Fascism had no deep bases in the structure of southern Italian society. There was large-scale unrest south of Rome during the postwar crisis, but it rapidly petered out.