For a long time, organized anti-Fascist movements remained weak, divided, and illegal and had no access to press or radio. The Communists were soon the most significant of these movements, as they had an underground organization and some Russian support and finance, but even they had only 7,000 members at most and had great difficulty in spreading their propaganda in Italy. Spies within the movement exposed many of the underground networks before they even had a chance to put down roots. New anti-Fascist groups were founded occasionally, but the secret police soon cracked down on them. Apart from the Communists, only Justice and Liberty, an alliance of republicans, democrats, and reformist Socialists founded by Carlo Rosselli and others in 1929, managed to build up a clandestine organization in Italy and a strong organization abroad, above all in France and Switzerland. Most prominent anti-Fascists were in prison, in “confinement” on remote islands, or in exile and had little contact with Italian reality. Mussolini had disbanded unions and replaced them with new syndicates with little bargaining power. Strikes were illegal and more or less ceased to occur. Employer power was reimposed in both the countryside and the city after the union victories of the postwar years, although the welfare corporatism of the Fascist regime allowed workers important economic benefits.

The only strong non-Fascist organization in the country was the Roman Catholic Church. The Vatican implicitly supported Mussolini in the early years and was rewarded in February 1929 by the Lateran Treaty, which settled the “Roman Question” at last. Vatican City became an independent state, Italy paid a large financial indemnity to the pope for taking over his pre-1870 lands, and a concordat granted the church many privileges in Italy, including recognition of church weddings as valid in civil law, religious education in secondary as well as primary schools, and freedom for the lay Catholic organizations in Catholic Action. However, the government soon began curbing Catholic Action, seeing it as a front for anti-Fascist activity by former members of the Popular Party. The Catholic youth organizations were closed for a time in 1931. When they reopened, they had to avoid sports, but, even so, they grew considerably in the 1930s. They were a serious rival to the Fascist youth bodies and trained a new generation that often managed to avoid Fascist indoctrination. The 1929 concordat remained in force until the 1980s and was the legal basis for continued church dominance of Italian society after World War II. The Fascist regime could easily enough repress forms of local opposition such as demonstrations and strikes, but anti-Fascist feeling became more widespread after the mid-1930s.

Nonetheless, Italy sent some 60,000 “volunteer” militiamen, as well as about 800 warplanes, 90 ships, and 8,000 jeeps, to fight on the side of Mussolini’s ideological cohort, Francisco Franco, in the Spanish Civil War (1936–39). This Italian force was defeated in 1937 at the Battle of Guadalajara. By the end of the war, some 4,000 Italian troops were killed and 11,000 injured. Italian anti-Fascists also fought Mussolini’s troops in Spain, a rehearsal for the civil war in Italy after 1943. Many of these Italian anti-Fascists joined the Spanish Republican armies (notably, four Italian companies in 1936), inspired by Carlo Rosselli’s cry “Today in Spain, tomorrow in Italy.” In all, at least 3,000 Italians fought on the anti-Fascist side, about 200 of whom had traveled directly from Italy. Some 500 Italian anti-Fascists were killed and 2,000 injured in the war. Leading Italian Communists and Socialists were Togliatti and Pietro Nenni.

Italy’s increasingly close alliance with Adolf Hitler’s Nazi Germany was resented and feared, even by many Fascists. So too was the shocking decision to impose sweeping Nazi-like anti-Semitic laws in 1938. These laws followed a long racist campaign organized by the Fascist press and media. Under these laws and decrees, signed by the king, Jews were condemned as unpatriotic, excluded from government jobs and the army, banned from entering Italy, and banned from attending or teaching school. In addition, all Jews had to register with the authorities, limits were placed on their economic activities, and they were forbidden to marry “Aryans.” In 1939 all books by Jewish authors were removed from the shops. Many Jews left Italy, while others were marginalized within Italian society. It had become clear that the Fascist government was likely to involve Italy in a disastrous European war, as indeed it did in 1940.