  We investigate the deconfining phase transition in SU(3) pure gauge theory
and in full QCD with two flavors of staggered fermions. The phase transition is
detected by measuring the free energy in presence of an abelian monopole
background field. In the pure gauge case our finite size scaling analysis is in
agreement with the well known presence of a weak first order phase transition.
In the case of 2 flavors full QCD we find, using the standard pure gauge and
staggered fermion actions, that the phase transition is consistent with weak
first order, contrary to the expectation of a crossover for not too large quark
masses and in agreement with results obtained by the Pisa group.
