In September 1937, Italo Orciani—a formerly under-employed traveling salesman from Ancona, Italy—entered the Italian Embassy in Innsbruck, Austria to confess his political “crimes” against Benito Mussolini’s dictatorship while serving in the International Brigades in Spain. He also offered valuable intelligence regarding other Italian members of the so-called Garibaldi Battalion. Orciani’s struggles in what he frequently referred to as “Red Spain” appear to have sparked a significant ideological transformation. Indeed, after escaping from the “Bolshevik hell” of the Civil War, Orciani had come to realize that Fascism, and not Communism, offered the workers and peasants the “justice and authority” required for maintaining a dignified, orderly civilization.

After waiting for several days without reply from regime officials, Orciani resolved to re-enter Italy on his own accord. Arrested by Blackshirt militiamen at the Brenner Pass, he was transferred to the Regina Coeli prison. Following a month-long investigation, Orciani was sentenced to five years in confino politico (political confinement) on the Tremiti Islands penal colony.

Almost immediately, Orciani began writing feverishly from his confino barracks—including a political memoir and numerous letters to Mussolini and Pope Pius XI. His goal was to underscore the brutality of the Bolshevik elements and vociferously proclaim his purported conversion to the “new light of imperial civilization.” As Orciani writes in his memoir, the difference between Fascism and Bolshevism is the same as comparing “Heaven to Hell, civilization to barbarism, the agents of order to bandits!”

Orciani’s writings subtly highlight the influences of the dictatorship’s repression, the Axis Alliance (1936), and the “racist turn” (1938) upon the popular Italian mind. Intended to dramatize, or “perform,” his contrition and thereby grease the proverbial wheels of sympathy among officials, these documents offer valuable glimpses into how political prisoners attempted to navigate their confino sentences by deploying the regime’s evolving sociopolitical values in their appeals for liberation and to ingratiate themselves to their Blackshirted masters for clemency.

Edited Volume

• Co-edited with Marla Susan Stone, A Fascist in "Red Spain": The Prison Memoirs of Italo Orciani, 1937-1946 (volume under contract with University of Toronto Press)