In Italy under Fascism, “much of the battle for the hearts and minds of Italians took place in the public arena, in the streets and squares of the peninsula's cities.” In a detailed study on the restructuring and refashioning of the street under the fascist regime of Benito Mussolini, Diane Yvonne Ghirardo explores increasing surveillance and spectacle in the public realm as a method to ensure consent and consensus. Similarly, David Atkinson explains how the streets became key sites where the regime, from its earliest days, articulated its authority. By its final months, streets and other public spaces were recognized by both local authorities and dissidents as an “incontrovertible sphere of dictatorship.” Atkinson mentions, for example, that during the 1943 factory strikes, the workers’ leaders decided to confine their resistance to the industrial action within the walls of Turin's factories because taking it onto the streets was deemed too dangerous—“pure suicide,” in the words of one of the strike's leaders.