Sociability was a main factor in the birth of socialism in Italy. In Italian villages osterie (pubs or taverns) were centres of republican and socialist conspiracies before and after unification; osterie opposed the campanili (bell towers) as symbols of clericalism and reaction. For Italian exiles in England, that background intersected with the longstanding local tradition of political clubs, and of radical discussion groups in free houses and cafés. The anarchist refugees in England and in other centres of the political diaspora developed – like the sovversivi in the United States – ‘an extensive and elaborate social infrastructure that contributed to produce a distinctive subculture and community’.

Refugees’ living conditions were generally very difficult. In the descriptions and memoirs of their lives in London, it is possible to note similarities, from the depressing weather and the poor quality of the food to the unfriendly temperament of the English people, whom Malatesta described as ‘perhaps the most xenophobic in the world’. In this adverse environment, refugees spent their social life with their fellow countrymen and political comrades. For the exiles, as Rudolf Rocker remembered, ‘the social life at that period depended entirely on the clubs’. Thus, political refugees used to assemble in national and political groups which met in regular restaurants, public houses or clubs. In these centres, they could organise forms of mutual aid and were able to maintain their usual social lives in a foreign context, strengthen the cohesion of the community, and hold their endless political discussions. In the 1870s, when the first groups of Internationalists found refuge in London, numerous small clubs and working class organisations were active around Clerkenwell and cosmopolitan Soho, and these were intertwined with the growing colony of political refugees from all over Europe.