March on Rome

Shortly after 11 on the unseasonably warm Monday morning of October 30, 1922, a 39-year-old, one-time schoolteacher-turned-political journalist — and former Socialist Party activist — named Benito Mussolini stepped down from a train arriving at Rome’s Termini station. He had traveled in overnight from his home in Milan, and before embarking he told the local station master, pausing to cast his black eyes up and down the empty platform, “I need to be punctual. From now on there must be no more delays.” This was the source of the sardonic joke that at least under Mussolini the trains always ran on time.