Little Giacomo attended elementary school in Lendinara, a few kilometers from Fratta Polesine, and received his first compulsory school diploma in 1893 (photos 2.1.1). Even as a child Giacomo was a brilliant student and was awarded (2.1.1.1).

He then profitably continued his high school studies at Liceo Celio in Rovigo (2.1.2), where he graduated brilliantly in 1903 (2.1.3).

His fellow students included Umberto Merlin (2.1.4) (1885-1964) and Alcide Malacugini (2.1.5) (1887-1966). Merlin, who was to be a leading exponent of the Popular Party in the Polesine, became undersecretary in the first Mussolini government; he became an opponent of the regime, a lawyer by profession, the first mayor of Rovigo in liberated Italy, a constituent father and a senator of the Republic. Malacugini, then a teacher, socialist activist and antifascist, after World War II will be a constituent and then an MP.

In his last years of high school Giacomo moved to Rovigo where he lived with a family; he devoted himself profitably to study and attended the rich library of the Accademia dei Concordi (2.1.6), founded in the sixteenth century, one of the city’s most prestigious cultural institutions.

A year before his high school graduation, in 1902, his father Girolamo died at the age of 63; he leaves behind his wife Isabella, 50, and three sons, Matteo, Giacomo and Silvio.

James intends to follow in his studies of law and political economy in the footsteps of his older brother Matteo (2.1.7), who will also have a decisive influence on his intellectual and militant socialist formation.

Matteo, 9 years older than Giacomo, had completed his university studies in Venice and Turin, where he was a fellow student of Luigi Einaudi, under the guidance of Salvatore Cognetti de Martiis. In 1901 he published for the publisher Bocca, in Turin, the essay L’assicurazione contro la disoccupazione; while an essay of his on Il pauperismo e la disoccupazione and a research on the early Carbonari of Fratta remained unfinished. In fact, he died prematurely of consumption in Liguria, in Nervi, on March 18, 1909. A great sorrow for Giacomo, who will treasure the research and interests of his older brother. His father Girolamo might not have encouraged Giacomo’s inclination for law and economics. He had once stated, “But I don’t know, ‘sti fioj. They all want to study political economy. Xela na roba che se guadagna i bezzi?” (But I don’t know, these kids. They all want to study political economy. Is that something that makes money?).

His mother, however, indulged him, and Giacomo in December 1903 enrolled in the Faculty of Law at the University of Bologna, “Alma Mater Studiorum”. He submitted, with his application to the Rector (photos 2.2.1), his birth certificate (2.2.2) and high school diploma (2.2.3). Shortly thereafter he moved, in Bologna, to number 32 Via Fondazza, a narrow street that rises perpendicularly from Strada Maggiore to touch Via Santo Stefano, two of the noblest streets in the city. Not far from it the painter Giorgio Morandi has his studio. There he would be born, in 1911 to a family of printers, Anteo Zamboni, who would be lynched by Fascist squadrists on October 31, 1926 after a failed assassination attempt on Mussolini (on June 10, 2024, the mayor of Bologna, Matteo Lepore, I uncovered a commemorative plaque next to the front door of the house that housed student Giacomo (2.2.4). When he returned to Bologna for professional and study purposes after graduation, Giacomo stayed at the Hotel Baglioni.

Giacomo assiduously attends classes at the university (2.2.5, 2.2.6) and lives the goliardic life in Bologna (2.2.7). The Alma Mater’s student academy record (2.2.8, 2.2.9) reports high grades and the profile of a bright student. That of the University of Bologna is the most vibrant law school in the country, and Giacomo has Professor Alessandro Stoppato (2.2.10), an influential academic, as the supervisor of his dissertation on recidivism (the reiteration of crime). Of moderate Catholic orientation, Stoppato greatly appreciated the young student (he soon judged him to be “of a chosen intelligence and a good soul”) and would later encourage him to pursue an academic career, offering him to practice at his law firm and paving the way for him to collaborate with important Italian journals on criminal law. A three-time deputy, Stoppato from 1920 was to be a senator for life. The author of numerous scholarly publications, he collaborated on the drafting of the 1913 Code of Criminal Procedure, but at the time of the young Matteotti’s studies he enjoyed great notoriety above all for the Murri trial, held in the courts of Bologna and Turin in 1905 for the murder of Count Francesco Bonmartini: a case that had enormous resonance at the time.

Giacomo is a well-to-do young scholar, diligent in his university endeavors and of pleasant and well-groomed appearance, as his portraits from those years attest (2.2.11, 2.2.12, 2.2.13).

During the years of goliardia, he frequented, among others, Adone Zoli and met Argentina Bonetti Altobelli, who in 1904, while Giacomo was attending his first year of law school, was elected to the leadership of the National Federation of Agricultural Workers: with its Federterra he would be for years a protagonist of the social redemption of the peasant women and peasants of Italy. Zoli (1887-1960), a lawyer of solid religious sentiments, joined the Popular Party in 1919, of which he became one of the most influential exponents. An anti-fascist and later a partisan, he was president of the Council and several times minister of Republican Italy (2.2.14). Relations with Argentina Altobelli (1866-1942) (2.2.15), a trade unionist of deep-rooted reformist conviction, as Giacomo’s involvement in the agricultural organizations of his Polesine grew over the years became much closer. It was she who, in the spring of 1920, signed in Rome for the Polesine farmers’ organizations the so-called Parini-Matteotti Concordat, a landmark union agreement, the result of a hard struggle with the Polesine Agraria.

In order to do a comparative analysis of criminal justice systems, which is useful for carrying out his dissertation on recidivism, James travels extensively in Europe. He obtains a passport (2.2.16) and stays for study in Germany, Austria, Holland, Belgium, France and England. He is already fluent in French, English and German, and soon after graduation he will further study languages along with statistics.

On November 7, 1907, he crowned his university studies by discussing, supervisor Stoppato, his thesis on The General Principles of Recidivism (2.2.17, 2.2.18) with which he graduated with honors (2.2.19).

He is encouraged to pursue the study of criminal law and decides to continue legal research while practicing law at Stoppato’s firm.

But another passion, the politics he had long been cultivating, burst into his life.

Always following the example and encouragement of his brother Matteo – town and provincial councilor, mayor of Villamarzana, president of the Fratta Mutual Aid Society – Giacomo is also very precocious in his political commitment, which to some extent his father, more tepidly, shares. His membership in the Italian Socialist Party dates back to 1898: he is just 13 years old (photos 2.3.1).

In 1901 (2.3.2) he signed his first article in “La Lotta”, the weekly newspaper of Polesine socialists (2.3.3): “Property is the cause of all evil”, writes Giacomo. He is 16 years old and has very clear ideas: socialism is the only hope for change and elevation of the subordinate classes (2.3.4, 2.3.5).

Despite his commitment to study, the young man also managed to be very active in the social field. In 1904 he founded the first People’s Library in his Fratta – convinced that reading and culture are indispensable tools of redemption – and committed personal time and substance to enrich it with books and educational initiatives.

While attending courses in the first year of law school, in April 1904 the Teatro Comunale in Bologna held, under the direction of Andrea Costa (2.3.6), the eighth Congress of the Socialist Party (2.3.7), which saw the maximalist wing of Arturo Labriola (2.3.8) prevail over the reformist wing of Filippo Turati (2.3.9) and Leonida Bissolati (2.3.10).

On January 26, 1908, local elections were held, and Giacomo Matteotti, running for the first time, was elected to the town council of Fratta Polesine (2.3.11). Later, thanks to the electoral law of the time that allowed voters in any constituency paying taxes by having landed property or other sources of income, he was also elected in Boara and Villamarzana (2.3.12), where he would also be mayor, and again in Lendinara, Badia and San Bellino.

He is from the start, as he calls himself, an “irregular in politics”. From a wealthy family, he fought with conviction for the Polesine peasants and, more generally, for the cause of the humble. He will be for this reason repeatedly accused, both by political opponents and in his own party, of being a “class traitor”, a “millionaire socialist”, or, again, the “fur coat millionaire”.

But from a young age Matteotti is a determined, prepared, combative politician. Even in his first speeches as a local administrator his speeches are always documented, his line uncompromising. He declined political passion with a deep legal, economic and administrative background and fought resolutely for the improvement of the living conditions of the proletariat, of the marginalized such as the laborers of his Polesine, in the name of a socialism that did not exclude class struggle but saw above all in the culture and civil education of workers the instrument of their human and social redemption (2.3.13).

As a staunch reformist, he is a gradualist: he firmly believes that democracy and social justice are achieved not by violent revolutionary motion but by conscious participation from below, which grows on the ground and finds the tools of social emancipation in solidarity and cooperation. What he fights for is a participatory and horizontal, grassroots democracy that is consolidated in local government through the tools of consensus and representation.

The Improvement League among the field workers, the agricultural associationism and cooperative, the school and local government only the tools to train citizens and consolidate the consciousness of new social rights: they are, for Giacomo Matteotti, the economic and civil fabric on which the Sol of the future is built (2.3.14).

So he writes in “The Struggle” on July 27, 1908:

“We know, too, that the municipality in the hands of the socialists, even as a result of the suffocating tutelage of the guardianship authorities, cannot be the workers’ cuckoldry but […] we must aspire to it in order to transform it into a provident function of patrimony in the interests of the proletariat. Thus it is that the problem of education, hygiene, public charity, the problem of local taxes, and the municipalization of public services are generally neglected; whereas, viewed from our point of view, they deserve to be respectfully seriously pondered and brought to solution by methods and means other than those in use by the reactionary feudalism of our conservatives”.

In those years in Polesine the opposition between the clerical-liberal axis, which governed the local authorities, and the Socialist opposition was very lively and manifested itself through heated verbal clashes and harsh press campaigns, then with the strategy of Socialist members leaving the council chamber in protest because the rights of the minority were not being guaranteed. In Fratta Polesine, Mayor Zamboni – inflexibly applying the law – had the council vote at its January 15, 10 meeting to disqualify from office the members of the Socialist minority, including Giacomo Matteotti, who had left the hall in protest.

On August 8, 1910, the Rovigo Provincial Council rejected Matteotti’s request to relinquish office: he had been elected in July while in Oxford for research on the British penal system and had given up campaigning. He is thus a provincial councilor, in the ranks of the opposition (2.3.15).

Among the reasons for his renunciation, in addition to his prolonged stay abroad, was certainly the deep prostration caused by the death of his beloved brother Matteo the previous spring; this was joined by concern for the precarious state of health of his younger brother Silvio (2.3.16, 2.3.17). In obvious consonance with his brothers, young Silvio had also joined the socialist idea and, despite his young age, was already appreciated as an organizer of peasant leagues and supporter of Polesine agricultural cooperation (2.3.18). Also suffering from a severe form of consumption, at only 23 years of age he died on Lake Garda where he had moved to recover from tuberculosis. Giacomo is, at this point, the only child of a widowed mother. Isabella Garzarolo, who is 59 years old at the time, is thus left alone to administer the family property and stores.

Matteotti’s solid reformist faith found an effective formulation as early as 1911, in the article How we understand reformism, published in “La Lotta” on August 26:

“We are convinced that, if one does not want to lock oneself up in the infecund puritanism of negative intransigence, nor return to the dream of the miraculous shock that shakes the bourgeois world, it is necessary to accept these arduous and complex ways that allow for that evolutionary reconstruction of society, which the socialists set as a means and an end, as the goal of their faith […] A penetrative method made up of steadfastness and fundamental interest and outward bendability and pliability; made up of formal transgressions and substantial intransigence […].

It requires enormous, manifold, varied work; propaganda and organization, theoretical revision and practical action, study and experiment, technical preparation for legislative reforms, preparation for administrative work in the communes; faculty to understand the ideal and the real, the immediate and the distant, to discern the lawful from the unlawful, to know the popular soul, not to titillate it demagogically; to approach it and bend it, and educate it to be astute but at the same time straight, practical and idealistic, socialist in short“.

July 10, 1912 saw the first split within the Italian Socialist Party. At the National Congress convened in Reggio Emilia from July 7 to 10, the editor of the “Avanti!”, Benito Mussolini (2.3.19), called for the expulsion of representatives of the reformist right led by Leonida Bissolati and Ivanoe Bonomi (2.3.20): the clash with the maximalist current was exacerbated by the Libyan War (2.3.21), which many reformists supported; these included Bissolati, Bonomi and Cabrini, who formed the Italian Socialist Reformist Party – PSRI, which was also joined by Gino Piva, Giacomo Ferri and the editor of the satirical magazine “L’Asino”, Guido Podrecca. Those who will be marginalized include Nicola Badaloni (2.3.22), “beloved master” and historical leader of Polesine socialism, among whose ranks internal opposition to such prominent figures as Gino Piva also sharpens. Filippo Turati, Giacomo Matteotti and many other reformists remain in the Party, whose leadership is entrusted to Costantino Lazzari (2.3.23), who had been among the founders, in 1882, of the Italian Workers’ Party, which later merged into the PSI. The majority of the PSI is now firmly in the hands of the maximalist current.

A few months later, in October 1912, Giacomo Matteotti was elected mayor of Villamarzana. In the same administrative round and in that of the following year, which saw throughout the province of Rovigo a good affirmation of socialist lists, he was also re-elected in Fratta Polesine, where he was also deputy mayor, and in Frassinelle, where he was alderman; he was also a councilor in the municipalities of Villanova del Ghebbo, San Bellino, Castelguglielmo, Lendinara, Badia Polesine, Fiesso Umbertiano, Pincara and Boara Polesine.

1914 is an important year in politics and not only because of the bursting of the Great War on the national and international scene. Giacomo Matteotti progressively consolidated his position as the leader of Polesine socialism (2.3.24), but his affirmation was also marked by a strong opposition to Mussolini, which became explicit first at the provincial congress held in Rovigo between March 13 and 15 and then at the national congress in Ancona (April 26-29, 1914).

Benito is two years older than Giacomo and behind him a stormy adolescence and youth and irregular studies; he is an aggressive boy, several times involved in fights. In 1902 he emigrated to Switzerland to escape the draft; in Zurich he began work as a journalist, collaborating on the periodical “L’avvenire del lavoratore”, of which he would become editor. Deported, returned to Italy, convicted of desertion and then amnestied, he fulfilled his military obligations and devoted himself to teaching. He has an enthralling oratory and a very lively intelligence. He has recently become a leading member of the Socialist Party, which he joined in 1900, and is, since 1912, editor of the party newspaper. He is on decidedly maximalist positions and a staunch anti-interventionist at the time of the Libyan War and the Congress of Reggio Emilia. The distance-both political and human-between Matteotti and Mussolini is immediately very deep. They confront each other, as Carlo Rosselli would write ten years after the assassination in his Eroe tutto prosa, “two worlds, two opposite conceptions of life”, and in this Matteotti “could truly call himself the anti-Mussolini”. The clash would become head-on – and fatal – in the years of Fascism, but even now in the socialist assemblies two men profoundly different in training, culture, temperament were facing each other.

At the Ancona Congress (2.3.25), which saw the maximalist current firmly in the majority and confirmed an absolutely intransigent political line, both had presented two separate motions sanctioning the incompatibility of dual membership in the PSI and Freemasonry. Mussolini’s, which was to be approved, imposed expulsion for those who did not comply with the congressional resolution; Matteotti’s – who, moreover, would never have Masonic sympathies – called on those concerned to voluntarily renounce, with the intention of not creating a further rift with broad strata of the Republican and radical secular left, in whose ranks Freemasonry was then gathering many adherents (2.3.26).

The local elections held on June 7, 1914, for the first time with universal male suffrage, show in the Polesine a further advance of the Socialist Party in the conquest of local administrations: the “red” municipalities increase from 7 to 32. Giacomo, who had also refused the multiple candidacy then permitted by law-as a parliamentarian he would present, in 1920, a proposal for an administrative electoral law of a proportional type, with a majority prize, providing for single candidacy-is elected to two town councils: in Fiesso as councilor and in Frassinelle as alderman. He is also confirmed, in Occhiobello, in the provincial council and in October he will be elected president of the provincial deputation, but he will resign shortly thereafter: the first meeting, held only the following October 2 because of the outbreak of World War I, will be inflamed by the intransigent neutralist attitude of the Socialists led by Matteotti, and the council is immediately dissolved (2.3.27). He would then be reconfirmed as provincial councilor, once again in the Occhiobello constituency, in the local elections the following February 28.

But in 1915 other events, both public and private, would mark a turning point in the life of the country and of Giacomo Matteotti.

We had left the young jurist Matteotti in Bologna, graduating cum laude. In the years that followed, while in Polesine he tried his hand at local politics, he continued on the path of legal research, language learning and study trips.

Before and after graduation – as we learn of his correspondence – he resides for some time in Rome, in the home of Dr. Curzio Casini, to learn “a little English”, exchange “a few conversations in German”, and tackle reading “a few novels in French”. But he also particularly cares, following in Matteo’s footsteps, for the study of statistics, ample evidence of which can already be found in his dissertation. Professor Stoppato, with whom he had graduated, continues to encourage him in his studies and supports him in the work of revising and expanding the thesis with a view to a publication to compete for tenure. In this regard, he writes to him, “I will be glad to see you go up”, and in the meantime in the student’s work he recognizes “originality of investigation”, without renouncing to point out “a few points”.

The book came out in 1910 in Turin for Bocca’s types with the title La recidiva and the subtitle Saggio di revisione critica con dati statistici (photos 2.4.1). Already in theIntroduction Matteotti argues for the urgency of a comprehensive reform of the penal and penitential system and presents recidivism as a growing social phenomenon that raises profound legal and social questions. In the concluding chapter, titled The Release from Prison and Indefinite Sentences, he foresees the need to accompany the certainty of punishment with the introduction of alternatives to prison and in any case aimed at the recovery of the convicted person, in the interest of both the individual and society.

Meanwhile, he publishes in the prestigious “Rivista di Diritto e procedura penale” by socialist Eugenio Florian an early article on the Absolute Nullity of the Criminal Judgment and perfects his legal education during 1910 and the following year with trips to England, Belgium, Holland, France, Austria and Germany. In the meantime, he began collaborating with other influential journals such as Emanuele Carnevale’s “Il Progresso del diritto criminale” (2.4.2) and the “Rivista penale” of the conservative Luigi Lucchini (2.4.3), and he continued his successful practice at the Stoppato law firm. His work meets with increasing favor and he receives recognition in academic and professional circles: his early authority is paving the way, in the early 1910s, for a university career.

Not yet 30 years old, Giacomo is an active dynamic young man who knows how to combine political militancy with study and professional activity and who cultivates various cultural interests-ranging from literature to theater, from music to figurative arts-without neglecting sports, which he loves. He is a regular frequenter of theater, both prose and opera, and of cinema, which in the early part of the century represented an absolute novelty. The cinematograph lands in Italy in March 1896 when Cinématographe Lumière (2.4.4) opens an office in Rome, in the Le Lieure photographic studio in Vicolo del Mortaro. The first real film produced in Italy is The Taking of Rome, from 1905, and the first major movie theater is the Moderno, which opens at that time in Rome’s Piazza dell’Esedra.

In Giacomo’s thick correspondence there is evidence of his literary and scientific interests and numerous readings, as well as keen observations on the shows and concerts he attended (2.4.5).

He is an assiduous and curious traveler (2.4.6), and numerous photographic shots show him hiking, boating, horseback riding and mountaineering (2.4.7, 2.4.8, 2.4.9, 2.4.10, 2.4.11, 2.4.12, 2.4.12.1).

Giacomo Matteotti is, in short, a brilliant and courteous young man who loves life and leads an existence traversed by a vibrant activism, by a “fame for action” that becomes at times anxiety about the inexorable passage of time and that spurs him to do more and more. It is a drive that also comes to him from his love of speed, so in keeping with modern times and with what, even in the field of art, the avant-gardes and first and foremost the Futurist movement of Filippo Tommaso Marinetti celebrate. In 1914 he gets his “driving license”: his is license number 18 issued in the province of Rovigo; he also owns a car, at the time a luxury for the few.

He is cultured, of natural and understated elegance, good-looking, wealthy, polyglot, fond of travel and good company. Success seems to come to him in profession, political action, public and private relations (2.4.13).

In the summer of 1912 he is at Boscolungo, on Mount Abetone, which has been frequented by tourists since the late 19th century and is beginning to enjoy good fortune abroad as well. Skiing is now practiced there and the resort is rediscovered as both a summer and winter resort. Giacomo Puccini also buys and renovates Villa Imperatori there. It is an à la page resort, frequented at the turn of the century by the upper middle class, intellectuals and artists (2.4.14).

On the way out of the cinema one evening, a gust of wind and a girl’s hat flies. Giacomo picks it up and hands it to her. From that moment on, the lives of Giacomo Matteotti and Velia Titta – the “Giaki” and the “Chini”, as they affectionately took to calling each other – would be immediately, deeply, inextricably welded until their deaths.