20th Century

In 1919, Benito Mussolini organized the Blackshirts, who formed the core of Italy’s Fascist movement, in Milan. In 1922, Mussolini started his March on Rome from Milan. Milan suffered severe damage from British and American carpet bombings especially in 1944 during World War II.

During the 1950s and 1960s, thousands of Italians, particularly from Southern Italy, moved to Milan to seek jobs within the city’s rapidly expanding economy and the population peaked at 1,723,000 in 1971. However, most of this population was lost during the '70s and '80s to the belt of new suburbs and small cities surrounding Milan. Nonetheless, Milan’s population seems to have stabilized, and there has been a slight increase in the population of the city since 2001.