Born in Verano di Costa, near Forli, Italy, to a blacksmith father (a radical socialist) and schoolteacher mother, Benito Mussolini was a violent bully as a child, but was also highly intelligent, his romantic imagination stimulated by his indulgent mother, who repeatedly told him that he was destined for great things. A voracious reader as a youth, Mussolini devoured the works of such political philosophers as Louis Auguste Blanqui, Friedrich Nietzsche, Georges Sorel, and, perhaps most significantly, Machiavelli.

Mussolini received his formal education in the Salesian college of Faenza and then at the normal school there, from which he obtained a teaching certificate. By 18, he had obtained a post as a provincial schoolteacher and also traveled, living essentially as a vagabond for several years in Switzerland and the Austrian Trentino. He soon gave up teaching for socialist journalism, becoming editor of the Milan Socialist Party newspaper Avanti! in 1912.

Mussolini's political development was astonishingly inconsistent, even mercurial. During his early Socialist phase, he was a committed pacifist and wrote many articles arguing against Italy's entry into World War I. Suddenly, however, he abandoned the Socialist Party line and just as vehemently urged Italy's entry into the war on the side of the Allies. The Socialist Party accordingly expelled Mussolini, who quickly founded a rival newspaper in Milan, Il popolo d'Italia. He used the new magazine to develop and disseminate the doctrine of what became the fascist movement, but he broke off publication to enlist in the Italian army as a private in 1915. He served until he was wounded in the buttocks by trench mortar fragments early in 1917. After convalescing, he resumed publication of Il popolo.

On March 23, 1919, encouraged and inspired by the grandiloquent poet, novelist, patriot, and adventurer Gabriele d'Annunzio, Mussolini founded in Milan with other war veterans a revolutionary hypernationalistic group called the Fasci di Combattimento. The name was derived from the Italian word fascio, "bundle," or "bunch," which in itself suggested unity but was also directly derived from the Latin word fasces, the bundle of rods bound together around an ax with the blade protruding that was the ancient Roman emblem of government power and authority.

Fascism soon abandoned its left-wing socialist origins to become a radical right-wing nationalism founded on ideas of brute force. Although many of Mussolini's early speeches were radically pro-labor and anti-church (in effect, left even of socialism and verging on anarchy), what captured the public's imagination was a nationalist message that evoked visions of a return to imperial Roman glory. This message was popular not only with the average Italian, but resonated with the likes of d'Annunzio and the wealthy landowners in the lower Po Valley, leading industrialists, and senior army officers. . .

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