The aim of this essay is to investigate Francesco Peruzzi’s life and career, a police officer of the Italian Public Safety, who had formed during the years of the liberal period, and who went through Fascism and its development into a totalitarian regime. Peruzzi never declared himself a fascist, but he was a key instrument in the repression of anti-fascism. He was police commissioner in Perugia, Udine and Trieste, where he regularly destroyed clandestine communist and Slovene nationalist networks. From October 1937 he was director of the OVRA, the regime’s secret police, for northern Italy. Finally he was police commissioner in Rome during the conspiracy of 25th July 1943.
