This will be your final history lesson for the week…..enjoy.

About here some person will read the title and immediately set off schooling me about the Godwin Law because they will assume that I am aiming this at the their fearless leader in DC.

As usual they would be WRONG!

This post is not about Mussolini or even his patron Hitler…nope….it is about a movement in Sicily in the late 19th century.

During the 1860s and 1870s, workers in Sicily supported each other through mutual aid societies, which claimed the right to strike and to lobby for wage increases. This precedent of organized labor, along with a recent history of peasant uprisings against feudal aristocracy and the spread of socialist ideology, set the stage for the Fasci Siciliani movement. A trade war affecting the main components of Sicily’s economy (fruit, wine, and sulfur) led the Sicilian elite to institute higher rents and taxes, transferring the economic hardship to the working class. Fasci, meaning “bundle” in Italian, were associations of laborers that advocated for workers’ rights constituted Sicily’s first social movement.

Source: Sicilian Fasci movement, 1893-4

For those that like history and politics it is always a joy to find out about how the world looked at society back in the day.

I hope that you, my reader, enjoyed your small slice of history for the day…..

Class Dismissed!