On 7 April 1926 Violet Gibson, an Irish woman in her early fifties, waited for Mussolini at the piazza del Campidoglio in Rome, where he had just inaugurated an international congress of surgeons. Having positioned herself near the passage through which the duce would leave the site, she raised the pistol with ‘firm and straight hand’ and shot at the duce's head. According to the eminent criminologist Enrico Ferri, soon before the attempt a group of students started to sing the fascist anthem, la Giovinezza. Had Mussolini not raised his head ‘in a mystical gesture so characteristic of his personality’, he would have been shot in the head. Instead, he escaped with only a small injury to his nose and Italy was saved.

Besides a hardening of the xenophobic feelings fostered by the fascists, this attempt on Mussolini's life was in itself of little political consequence. Yet it made a profound impression on the now ageing Enrico Ferri, who had previously expressed great shock to his students when a conspiracy against Mussolini's life was discovered in early November, 1925. Ferri's interest in the attempt was now clearly centred on the person behind it, whom he accepted to become the defence advocate. In 1927 he published an article on Violet Gibson in the Revue Internationale de Droit Pénal, developing an analysis of her personality in line with the conceptual framework of the criminological school to which he himself had made such significant contributions – the Scuola Positiva.