Carrara is unanimously recognized, internationally, as the capital of anarchy and this is certainly due to its history that sees it linked to the libertarian movement for a century and a half, in fact in the years immediately following World War II, in a city of such modest size there were well over twenty anarchist groups and circles located throughout the municipal territory.
Carrara saw its social development gripped by the harsh working conditions associated with the marble quarrying activity, which in the 19th century saw the majority of the population engaged, this aspect made it the destination of militant sojourns regarding the emancipation of the masses of important figures linked to the anarchist ideal such as Malatesta, Cafiero, Gori, Galleani, Molinari and Bakunin himself, who saw the Carrara situation as fertile ground for the propagation and implementation of the ideas they professed.
If we add to this the fact that Giuseppe Mazzini also stayed in Carrara several times, finding fertile ground for the republican perspective, it is easy to understand how this city was particularly active on the anti-authoritarian front.
The first event that happened in the city relative to anarchism were certainly the 1894 uprisings, when on January 13 a demonstration in solidarity with the peasants of the Sicilian fasci, who had suffered heavy repression following protests the previous year, soon turned into a full-fledged insurrectional act in which the demonstrators destroyed telegraph lines, erected barricades and clashed harshly throughout the city with the forces of order, causing deaths and injuries on both sides. The insurrectional attempt, which, wrote Prime Minister Crispi to the king, “…is not political, but has antisocial tendencies, intentions hinting at national dissolution, at the damage of property, at the destruction of the family.” lasted for three days, until a state of siege was declared and the extraordinary commissioner, General Nicola Heush, brought in the Royal Guard, which suppressed the riots with extreme harshness: immediately more than 300 people were arrested indiscriminately for sedition (209 of whom were believed to be anarchists) and at the end of the trial 454 were sentenced to more than 2,500 years in prison in addition to the many who escaped the police meshes were forced to emigrate.
The most serious sentence, 23 years, was given to Luigi Molinari, who was held responsible for the incident even though he was not physically present at the riots, as he had given some lectures in Carrara in the previous weeks and who wrote the famous song “Hymn of the Uprising” for the occasion.
It must then be remembered that when, between 1911 and 1914, the Carrara Chamber of Labor was led by Alberto Meschi, an anarchist trade unionist from Ferrara who led it to join the U.S.I (Italian Union of Trade Unions), the membership increased from 1355 to 12000, and it was thanks to the agitations and struggles proposed by Meschi if the quarrymen obtained reduced working hours and decent conditions with some contractual claims that have become inescapable today.
During the liberation struggle in Carrara, there were many anarchist partisan formations, such as the Lunense, the Schirru Brigade, the Lucetti Battalion and Elio Wochiecevich’s group, to the point that the CLN at the end of the war assigned to them the headquarters of the Ridotto of the Politeama Theater, at the time the largest opera house in Tuscany and known in the city from that time as the Salone Germinal, as a result of their commitment to the Resistance.
It was precisely this theater that saw, from September 15 to 19, 1945, the birth of the Federazione Anarchica Italiana (F.A.I.), during a national congress that filled it well beyond capacity.
Thus the reason for the Carrara-Anarchy binomial seems clear, and if someone wanted to take a tour of its most significant sites they should probably start from the large plaque placed outside the Dogali Barracks (which today houses the Carducci Middle School) where the most serious clash of the uprisings took place on January 16, 1894: 400 demonstrators engaged in battle with one of the mounted military units sent by the government. The day ended with eight demonstrators killed, several wounded and set off arrests, many immediate. Those arrested, many were very young, were taken to the barracks jails where they remained segregated for months. The plaque recalls the events and the names of those involved.
A curiosity: for one of those nemesis that history produces the place where one of the first clashes took place and saw the demonstrators victorious is the locality “three pines” on Mount Foce that separates Carrara from Massa, there a barricade managed to stop a department of carabinieri who wanted to reach the city. In that location today stands a luxurious villa owned by a marble industrialist.
Leaving Dogali in a few minutes’ walk one arrives at Piazza Gramsci (formerly Piazza D’Armi) in whose gardens stands the large monument in memory of the figure of Alberto Meschi, which represents him holding the hand of a group of quarrymen, and which bears engraved in marble the achievements he made.
Descending from Piazza Gramsci, one crosses the Piazza del Duomo where, next to a plaque commemorating the murder of philosopher Giordano Bruno by the Catholic Inquisition and placed by libertarians not coincidentally in front of the city’s main church, is the provisional headquarters of the Anarchist Group Germinal, a member of the F.A.I.
The headquarters is temporary because it had to be moved from the historic hall of the Politeama’s ridotto in 2011 following a series of building abuses that caused structural failures that rendered the building uninhabitable, but the Germinal anarchists continue to consider that their real headquarters and have been struggling for years to succeed in getting the situation healed so that they can return.
Continuing the walk we pass Alberica Square where a plaque commemorates Francisco Ferrer Guardìa, a Spanish anarchist pedagogue and founder of the Escuela Moderna who was killed following a sentence imposed by a military court on charges of fomenting the anti-militarist riots of “Tragic Week” in 1909.
Leaving the square, one enters Via Ulivi, where the Circolo Culturale Anarchico Gogliardo Fiaschi is based, opened in 1975 by a number of prominent militants and partisans from the city’s anarchist scene, such as Giovanni Mariga “the Padovan” and Belgrado Pedrini (author of the lyrics to the very famous song “Il Galeone”) in addition to Fiaschi himself, whose name it bears today.
Fiaschi, who left Carrara in 1957 with two Spanish comrades, Facerias and Vincente, to organize an assassination attempt on dictator Francisco Franco and was arrested in Bacellona, was the animator of the circle until his death. The Circle has within it a large collection of publications pertaining to anarchism available for both purchase and reference.
Leaving the circle and crossing De André Square, one comes to Via San Piero where the Coopertaiva Tipolitografica is located. Opened in the early 1970s by Alfonso Nicolazzi and Dino Mosca to meet the need, at a time of great ferment, to print publications pertaining to the anarchist movement on their own, it is a self-managed libertarian print shop aimed at spreading libertarian and egalitarian thought.
Umanità Nova, the anarchist newspaper (now weekly) founded by Errico Malatesta in 1920 in addition to the movement’s main publications, is printed here.
For the more curious, it is worth going up to the village of Gragnana, just a few minutes’ drive from the center of Carrara, to have a glass of local wine at the Circolo Malatesta, named for the frequentation of the well-known anarchist militant, which tradition has it that it is the oldest anarchist circle in Italy and therefore, they say here, in Europe and the world.
In Torano then, also reachable on foot, in some rooms of the former school, there is the Germinal Archive that collects various documents and historical texts of the movement and is frequented by many enthusiasts and researchers.
Before leaving Carrara it is worth visiting the municipal cemetery of Turigliano, near the train station, where in the garden outside the cemetery, there is a large monument dedicated to Gaetano Bresci, who on July 29, 1900 killed King Umberto I, commissioned and placed by anarchists in the 1980s and which and raised bitter controversy, on the wall of the garden is a plaque that says it names the space after Gaetano Bresci, regicide. Inside in a special, deconsecrated section are the graves of various personalities of the Italian anarchist movement, such as Alfonso Failla, Alberto Meschi, Belgrado Pedrini, Gino Lucetti, who made an attempt on Mussolini’s life in 1926, and Giuseppe Pinelli, the anarchist railroader who was unjustly accused of being the perpetrator of the Piazza Fontana massacre and died being thrown by police from a window of the Milan police headquarters in 1969.
Those who would like to breathe in a unique atmosphere in this respect, however, should pass through Carrara on the occasion of Anarchist May 1, a day of commemoration carried on for more than a century in which hundreds of people gather in the morning to follow the street rallies and participate in the procession that parades through the streets of the city amid chants and public speeches on the significant milestones of the route.