Guido Buffarini Guidi

Guido Buffarini Guidi was born in Pisa in 1895 to Luigi Buffarini Guidi and Liberata Bardelli. He volunteered for military service in an artillery regiment on the outbreak of the First World War, spending four full years at the front and rising to the rank of captain in 1917. His conduct earned three War Merit Crosses. Still in uniform, he received permission to undertake university study and completed a law degree at Pisa in March 1920, remaining in active service until 1921. He later married Maria Augusta Macciarelli.

Demobilised but politically radicalised, Buffarini Guidi emerged as one of the principal organisers of the Fascist squads in Pisa, acquiring a reputation—within the mythology of the Tuscan ras—for relative moderation, credited with restraining some of the early excesses of local squadristi. His administrative skill and talent for consolidating authority made him indispensable to the party’s regional consolidation.

In April 1923 he was elected mayor of Pisa, but resigned in June 1924 upon winning election as deputy for the province of Pisa on the Fascist list. The subsequent accumulation of offices—podestà, federal secretary, and senior party figure in the province—made him the dominant political personality in Pisa and increasingly in Tuscany. Concurrently he practised law and held auxiliary roles such as the presidency of the Pisano Committee for Dalmatian Action and an honorary consulate within the Voluntary Militia for National Security.

His regional success brought national advancement. On 8 May 1933 he was appointed Undersecretary at the Ministry of the Interior, succeeding Leandro Arpinati. For the next decade Buffarini Guidi became one of the most powerful figures within the apparatus of the Fascist state. From this pivotal position he engineered a remarkable degree of centralised oversight, exerting influence across all Italian provinces through the appointment of compliant prefects and by counterbalancing the influence of party secretaries sent from Rome as competing loci of authority. He built a parallel information network that bypassed Mussolini’s private secretariat: daily reports on public opinion, rumours of dissent, and the activities of senior Fascist officials enabled him to present himself as the indispensable custodian of domestic order.

He developed a close personal and political alliance with Galeazzo Ciano, who advanced through the ranks of power in parallel. Supported by their respective private “clans,” Buffarini Guidi and Ciano formed, for several years, a central axis within the regime. However, the growing subordination of Italy to Nazi Germany in the late 1930s sharpened internal rivalries. Buffarini Guidi resisted efforts—particularly after 1938—to remodel the Fascist Party on Nazi organisational lines, and he attempted to limit the impact of the anti-Jewish legislation approved in 1938 under German pressure. He also worked to preserve his direct influence over Mussolini against attempts by successive party secretaries to curtail his dominance of internal affairs.

There are thus some ironies in the fact that he is best known for the 'Circolare Buffarini Guidi', which effectively banned Pentecostal worship on the grounds that its practices were 'contrary to the social order and harmful to the physical and mental integrity of the race'. The circular faithfully echoed Vatican terminology, relying on specious 'health and public hygiene' concerns and pseudo-medical reports that pathologized Pentecostal worship as signs of mental feebleness. The Apostolic Nuncio, Francesco Borgongini Duca, actively leveraged reports from clergy and informants to elicit these repressive measures from the Ministry of the Interior. The immediate impact was the dissolution of Pentecostal meeting places and organizations, banning their worship and becoming the official legal basis for the judiciary’s subsequent judgments. While the ban was specifically aimed at Pentecostals, it also sparked repressive measures against other Protestant churches. 

After Italy’s entry into the Second World War, Buffarini Guidi’s intimate knowledge of public morale and his oversight of anti-regime sentiment, Vatican neutrality, and intra-elite conspiracy bred in him a cautious pessimism about Italy’s military prospects. His political enemies—emboldened by Italy’s worsening fortunes—formed a temporary alliance that in February 1943 forced his resignation from government alongside his longtime ally Ciano. Mussolini nonetheless granted both men the unusual privilege of remaining members of the Gran Consiglio del Fascismo.

During the turbulent months from February to July 1943 Buffarini Guidi remained largely passive and isolated amid the swirl of conspiracies that culminated in the dramatic session of 24 July. Present at the meeting, he voted in support of Mussolini. Two days later, on 26 July, he was arrested on the orders of Marshal Badoglio and imprisoned with other loyalists at Forte Boccea.

The German commando raid of 12 September 1943 liberated the imprisoned Fascist leaders; Buffarini Guidi was flown to Munich and subsequently installed in the newly created Italian Social Republic in northern Italy. To maintain the appearance of a functioning Fascist state still committed to the Axis alliance, he was appointed Minister of the Interior. His tenure was marked by constant conflict with other Fascist leaders who had followed Mussolini to Salò, the re-emergence of old rivalries, and the intensifying collapse of order as armed resistance expanded across northern Italy. In the eyes of many contemporaries, Buffarini Guidi came to symbolise the weakness, unpopularity, and moral exhaustion of the Salò regime.

On 12 February 1945 Mussolini abruptly removed him from office under circumstances that remain obscure. In the final weeks of the regime he disappeared from public view. He was with the retreating Fascist column at Como in late April 1945 and urged the last loyalists around Mussolini to seek refuge in Switzerland. On 26 April he was captured by partisans while attempting to cross the border.

Tried before the extraordinary assize court the following month, he made an unsuccessful attempt to poison himself. On 10 July 1945 he was executed by firing squad inside San Vittore Prison, Milan.

His famous 'Circular' notoriously survived the Fascist regime that enacted it, remaining in force until 1955, sustained by the post-war Christian Democratic leadership, who found the 'ecclesiastical enslavement of successive governments' politically useful against Cold War Bolshevism. However, the ban's futility was exposed by liberal jurists who increasingly dismissed cases against Pentecostals, culminating in a 1953 rejection of an appeal by the Corte di Cassazione. The repeal of the Circolare in 1955, following the increasing reluctance of police officers to apply it, marked the opening of a new phase for all Italian Protestant churches and was seen as a moral victory for 'the humble' in Italian religious life. The historical persecution justified by the circular became a point of reconciliation in later decades, acknowledged through exchanges of mutual forgiveness between Catholic and Pentecostal charismatic figures in the 1990s.

Sources

• Gagliano, Stefano (ed.), Un capitolo della intolleranza religiosa in Italia: la Circolare Buffarini-Guidi e i Pentecostali (1935–2015) (Milano: Biblion, 2017)

• Hutchinson, Mark, and Paolo Zanini, The Brill Global History of Italian Protestantism, vol. II (Leiden: Brill, 2026).

• Peyrot, Giorgio, La circolare Buffarini-Guidi e i Pentecostali (Roma: Associazione italiana per la libertà della cultura, 1955)

• Rochat, Giorgio, Regime fascista e Chiese evangeliche. Direttive e articolazioni del controllo e della repressione (Torino: Claudiana, 1990)

• Zanini, Paolo, The Protestant Peril: The Church and Italian Catholics on the Issue of Religious Freedom, 1922-1955 (Leiden: Brill, 2025).