The extraordinary footprint of Giacomo Matteotti (photos 9.1.1) in the history of the twentieth century makes it difficult to separate memory from myth. Even immediately after his death, his political and human story takes on a symbolic value: for his party comrades he is the “Martyr”, for others he becomes the symbol of the intransigent, extreme witness of freedom that opposes all fascism and all totalitarianism.

Going beyond a mere exercise in civic memory, Giacomo Matteotti soon became the object of a secular cult that took on religious connotations: commemorative postcards, veritable “holy cards” with an effigy of the Martyr, often accompanied by the most famous motto, which moreover was attributed to him by Filippo Turati, “Kill me, the idea that is in me nothing will ever kill” (9.1.2).

Outrage over Matteotti’s assassination spurred a whole generation of militants to measure themselves against politics and civic engagement. It is, Matteotti’s, a call that not even the fascist dictatorship, which immediately imposed damnatio memoriae, could contain.

Matteotti also became the universal symbol of heroic opposition to all totalitarianism in graphic and satirical literature around the world. He inspires poets and writers who dedicate unforgettable pages to him (9.1.3).

It became a landmark of “liberating freedom” not only among Italian anti-fascists but throughout the world (9.1.4). Circles, associations, committees are founded in his name in the enforced underground of fascism, in Italy, and, abroad, in the circles of exiles but also throughout democratic Europe and the Americas. Monuments, busts, paintings, headquarters of libertarian movements and workers’ organizations around the world are dedicated to him. In Vienna a city block bears his name.

But that Matteottian memory is not only a militant memory, it is also a combatant one: it is a flag that will fly in the Spanish Civil War and the Italian Resistance (9.1.5). During the war of liberation, as the Allied front climbs northward, streets, squares, bridges are named after him in every city and town in liberated Italy.

His political and civic testimony fuels the constituent spirit, and his ideals of freedom and democracy are transfused into the Republican Constitution. After World War II, Matteotti’s fortunes seem to decline: far from the great ideal “churches” that mobilize the country, his memory is not espoused by mass parties. Yet, he resists oblivion.

A century after his passing there has been an extraordinary comeback. On the matteottian centenary (9.1.6) there has been an exceptional flowering of initiatives not only commemorative but also and above all civic, cultural and educational. More than a century after his assassination, a great “Matteotti workshop” has opened, urging us to civil commitment to democracy and freedom.

All this is attempted to be accounted for, albeit summarily and with inevitable gaps, in the walls of this room. More on Matteottian memory and myth can be found in the following rooms.

In the moving commemoration of Matteotti that Filippo Turati pronounced in the Sala della Lupa on June 27 before the Aventine deputies, the construction of the martyr’s image is accompanied by the exhortation to take up his civil and political lesson: “Gentlemen, from the massacre of Giacomo Matteotti the new history of Italy begins. To us only one task: to be worthy of it!” (photos 9.2.1).

It is his party, the PSU, that immediately promotes the Matteotti memorial. In the weeks following the young secretary’s death, an anthology of his writings against fascism is published, with a preface by Claudio Treves. It is entitled Relics (9.2.2); its circulation is soon prevented by the regime. Piero Gobetti also (9.2.3), outraged by the assassination, publishes a short but intense essay entitled Matteotti, which helps consign his figure to history (9.2.4).

Days after the murder, on the wave of outrage, a young lawyer from Savona wrote to the secretary of his city’s PSU section to ask for a membership card: “I can no longer remain outside your party, it would be cowardice […] I still ask if you would be willing to issue me the card with the sacred date of poor Matteotti’s disappearance, which will always sound for me admonition and command”. His name is Sandro Pertini (9.2.5). He will be arrested for activities against the regime and later sentenced to long years in prison; hero of the resistance (9.2.6), he is elected President of the Republic in 1978. Another young socialist militant decides to take a line of even more rigid opposition to the dictatorship after Matteotti’s death: a choice that will force him into long exile to be followed by imprisonment: he is Giuseppe Saragat (9.2.7), also a future President of the Republic, who would pay Matteotti public tribute several times. In 1973, to “preserve the memory of the martyr”, he established the Giacomo Matteotti Foundation, of which he was president until his death (9.2.8, 9.2.8.1).

Among the young people who impulsively joined the PSU after the assassination was Carlo Rosselli, who was to be, with his brother Nello, founder of the Giustizia e Libertà movement (9.2.9). An exile in Paris, in 1934 he published a splendid political portrait of Matteotti, Eroe tutto prosa, in which he stressed the anti-rhetorical character of the man who “became the symbol of anti-fascism and anti-fascist heroism”. He was to be assassinated with his brother at Bagnoles-de-l’Orne by French assassins in the service of fascism on June 9, 1937 (9.2.10).

The memory of the deceased serves to close ranks in the socialist movement and fuel opposition to the dictatorship. Shortly after the assassination Oddino Morgari (9.2.11), a fellow political militant, defined Matteotti with a particularly effective expression: “He was the idealist-practitioner. He was a hater of demagogy wherever he encountered it” A year later, the elder Costantino Lazzari (9.2.12) remembers the late secretary with regret, evoking How Good Socialists Used to Be (9.2.13). The Matteotti murder also inflames Pietro Nenni (9.2.14) who dedicates to the murder and the Chieti trial writings of firm denunciation of the dictatorship that will cost him persecution and exile (9.2.15).

Around Matteotti’s memory coagulates starting in 1926, in Paris, a group of exiles (9.2.16) whose spiritual father is the elderly Turati, who adventurously expatriated with the help of Rosselli, Oxilia, Pertini and Parri (9.2.17, 9.2.18). An Italian Giacomo Matteotti Fund is also established (9.2.19, 9.2.20); Matteotti Funds are also created in Germany and northern Europe to support the victims of the Spanish War (9.2.21, 9.2.22). In 1931, 7 years after the assassination, Turati dedicated a moving speech in French to the deceased that touched the conscience of the world. Around his memory huddle in the French capital Bruno Buozzi (9.2.23, 9.2.24), who was to die slaughtered by the Nazis on June 4, 1946 at La Storta, on the outskirts of Rome, Menè Modigliani with his wife Vera and Claudio Treves. The old comrade died on June 11, 1933, a few hours after commemorating the death of his friend Matteotti in the socialist section of the French capital (9.2.25).

The memory of those years abroad (9.2.26) always alongside Mené (9.2.27) and those antifascists is entrusted to the splendid pages of Vera Modigliani’s memoirs. Her book, Exile, opens with a chapter with the emblematic title, Sotto il segno di Matteotti (Under Matteotti’s Sign), indicating how it was precisely Matteotti’s assassination that was the beginning of antifascism in Italy and abroad. In those pages, with exquisite sensitivity and great elegance of writing, he also leaves us with a portrait of Matteotti that is striking and moving, beginning with the description from his eyes: “Matteotti’s eyes! Shining, radiant. The iris, sapphire blue in color, set the very black pupil and truly had the splendor of a precious stone, without having its hardness” (9.2.28).

But Matteottian memory also circulates beyond exile and underground circles. An International Unity Front is initiated in the British labor world to denounce the atrocities of fascism in the eyes of public opinion around the world. In this context, the Women’s International Matteotti Committee is born on the initiative of Sylvia Pankhurst (9.2.29), which also works to support Velia (9.2.30).

The Committee is just one of many initiatives organizing the labor movement and the fight against totalitarianism in the name of the Italian martyr. Matteotti becomes a flag of freedom all over the world. And it will be royal, not just ideal, flag during the Spanish Civil War when, in its name, the Batallón Matteotti is formed in December 1936 (9.2.31, 9.2.32, 9.2.32.1, 9.2.32.2) that foreshadowed the Matteotti Brigades that would fight in Italy in the Liberation War (9.2.33, 9.2.34, 9.2.35, 9.2.36). The memory of Giacomo Matteotti also directly inspired another major partisan formation, the Maiella Brigade (9.2.37) led by Commander Hector Troilus (9.2.38) who had been Matteotti’s close collaborator as a young lawyer. Matteotti’s political lesson-his reformist and parliamentarist socialism, his ideals of social solidarity, his staunch pacifism-spilled over into the principles and values that animated the constituent spirit and would, from the mid-1940s (9.2.39), an essential point of reference and a founding myth of republican Italy. For more than a hundred years throughout the world the name of Giacomo Matteotti has evoked sentiments of freedom, democracy and social justice.

While confined to the Canary Islands for his opposition to the dictatorship of General Primo de Riveira, the great Spanish writer Miguel de Unamuno (photo 9.3.1) dedicates powerful verses to Matteotti. From Fuerte Ventura he contemplates the ocean and writes:

“Oh my brother! Together

We stood against the ignominy

[…] You are Italy, O my

big brother…

No, you are much more than that: you are

The protest of the soul of the world”.

It is only the first in a series of tributes to Matteotti’s memory paid by intellectuals and artists all over the world: few politicians have inspired entire generations and aroused such deep and lasting echoes even abroad. Matteotti’s militancy, his murder, the farcical trial in Chieti, and the fate of his widow Velia have inspired writers Stefan Zweig and George Orwell, painters Diego Rivera and Trude Waehner, and numerous sculptors, as well as satirical cartoonists around the world.

The early novel by the Belgian Marguerite Yourcenar (9.3.2), Coin of the Dream(Denier du rêve) (9.3.3), first published in 1934, hinges on the narration of an assassination attempt on Mussolini made by the protagonist in memory of her anti-fascist father and Giacomo Matteotti. The Austrian Zweig (9.3.4) in his autobiographical novel Die Welt von Gestern (9.3.5), in Italian The world of yesterday. Memories of a European , recalls the case-which caused a stir at the time-of Giuseppe Germani, who was arrested in an attempt to illegally deport Velia and her children. George Orwell (9.3.6) wrote in 1943 for the BBC a radio reduction of a short story by Ignazio Silone (9.3.7), Der Fuchs (The Fox) (9.3.8), highlighting the memory of Matteotti that fuels the libertarian sentiment of an entire generation.

The crime that takes place on June 10, 1924 may also mark the fate of a child. Little Alberto Steiner, son of Emerico and Fosca Titta, is Matteotti’s grandson; he makes his first communion that day (9.3.9). But the date remains etched in his memory because in the evening the distressed phone call arrives in Milan from Aunt Velia, desperate because her husband has not returned home. Evoking that day, Albe will later explain in her notes “why I became an anti-fascist” (9.3.10). He will also become, after World War II, one of Italy’s greatest graphic artists, but even as a child he leaves an imprint of his talent in the essential, grim portrait of Mussolini that he sketches then (9.3.11).

Austrian painter Waehner (9.3.12) dedicates one of her plates in the Freedom and Right series to the Matteotti assassination (9.3.13), while the Mexican Diego Rivera (9.3.14) depicts in his Mussolini mural, created for the New York Workers School of Manhattan, Matteotti being stabbed by the fascist leader’s assassins (9.3.15).

Sculptures dedicated to the martyr are found everywhere in the world. They are busts, bas-reliefs, bronze castings spread on all continents. We remember for all of them one, which has been lost: it is the high relief of Matteotti that was placed in the House of the People in Buenos Aires on June 10, 1927 (9.3.16). The work, by sculptor and socialist deputy Gaetano Zirardini (9.3.17), was destroyed in April 1953 in the fire set by Peronist militants.

Matteotti monument (9.3.18) by Austrian sculptor Siegfried Charoux (9.3.19), completed in Vienna in 1929, will tower center stage at the Fourth Congress of the Socialist Workers’ International held in the Austrian capital on July 25, 1931 (9.3.20). Vienna again, in the years between 1926 and ’27 the Matteottihof was born (9.3.21, 9.3.22, 9.3.23), a workers’ block built to the design of architects Heinrich Schmid and Hermann Aichinger. A plaque commemorates Matteotti at its entrance, with a plaque by Charoux next to it (9.3.24). Suppressed during Nazism, the naming of Matteotti returned to the facade of the apartment complex after World War II.
In the first issue of “La Libertà” organ of the Paris anti-fascist concentration published on May 1, 1927 (9.3.25), is reproduced a photograph of the Russian artist Gabriel Spat engaged in the creation of a marble bust entitled Martyr who lives again (9.3.26), accompanied by this note: “The cult of Giacomo Matteotti crosses the limits of Italy in chains. Brussels erects monuments to him, the red Vienna has dedicated a square to him. In Europe and America his memory is honored by all conscious proletarians and all free spirits”.

But it is not only “high” art that has handed down and transfigured Matteotti’s memory into myth. Giacomo Matteotti’s effigy is spread on commemorative postcards – so-called “santini” (photo 9.4.1, 9.4.2, 9.4.3, 9.4.4 ) – circulating clandestinely throughout Italy and, freely, throughout the world feeding a kind of secular Christology. In memory of the Martyr, the Socialist Almanac bears mourning on its cover (9.4.5), also in the Americas (9.4.5.1).

For satire, Matteotti’s story immediately became exemplary: cartoonists and illustrators from every country told with strong, grotesque, often dramatic strokes the story of his extreme defiance, his martyrdom, justice bent to domination. The most illustrious signatures and newspapers try their hand at the enterprise: in Italy, the “Avanti!” (9.4.6, 9.4.7, 9.4.8) and the “Yellow Beak” ( 9.4.9); in Germany “Simplicissimus” ( 9.4.10) and “Lachen Linke” ( 9.4.11, 9.4.12, 9.4.13); in the Netherlands “Notenkramer” (9.4.14, 9.4.15, 9.4.16); in France, “Le Canard enchaîné” ( 9.4.17), “L’Humanité” ( 9.4.18) and “Le petit provençal” (9.4.19); in South America, “Critica” (9.4.20) in Buenos Aires and “L’Italia” (9.4.21) of São Paulo, Brazil; in the United States, the “New York Herald” (9.4.22). In Italy and everywhere, Matteotti’s name rises to a universal symbol of the struggle for freedom and will remain so even after the end of World War II. First after World War II (9.4.23) and then in the 1970s, near the fiftieth anniversary of the crime, new monuments are erected at places of Matteottian memory: in Rome (9.4.24), in Riano (9.4.25), in Rovigo (9.4.26).

In June 1924, a few days after Matteotti’s death, while dismay still dominates in Italy and abroad and everything authorizes one to think the worst, Filippo Turati (photo 9.5.1) communicates his deep disturbance in a letter to Anna Kuliscioff (9.5.2), who remained in Milan, and anxiously asks, “When will we finish paying the debt we owe poor Giacomo?”.

It is difficult to give, today, a complete answer to this question, but there is no doubt that something, in order to pay off this “debt”, was done on the occasion of the centenary celebrations: in fact, 2024 was a truly extraordinary year for the Matteottian memory. The anniversary of the brutal assassination has registered – in addition to the official commemorations and the prestigious conferences and exhibitions organized by the specially formed National Committee – an exceptional harvest of initiatives often born from below: from spontaneous committees that have sprung up throughout the country, from the world of education, from partisan associations, from local authorities and from many circles and associations that wanted to remember and, above all, actualize the great civil and moral lesson of Giacomo Matteotti and his testimony in defense of democratic institutions, Parliament, social justice, the dignity of the person and labor.

One fact is enough to account for the phenomenon: in 1974, on the occasion of the 50th anniversary, a monograph was dedicated to Giacomo Matteotti: the fine biographical essay signed by Antonio G. Casanova. In 2024, the books on Giacomo Matteotti that have crowded the shelves of bookstores number more than 50. Of these, as many as 10 are aimed at young audiences: graphic novels, educational texts and novels designed for children and schools. Also on the publishing front, it should also be noted that several cultural magazines have dedicated monographic issues to Giacomo Matteotti.

Numerous exhibitions have been mounted in Italy and abroad, thanks in part to the efforts of the National Committee and many cultural institutes. Public and private archives have digitized and shared online a vast documentation on the Matteotti trials that is in part still unexplored, or known only to a few researchers, such as the Salvemini fund at the London School of Economics.

Numerous plays dedicated to Giacomo Matteotti have been toured throughout Italy, and films and animations have been produced for the centenary. Concerts were held, in Italy and abroad, with offerings of cultured and popular music. Exhibitions of paintings and graphic works were organized. School children from all over Italy produced an extraordinary number of textual, graphic and multimedia works; innovative formulas of participatory teaching were developed for the training of children and teachers in the country’s main schools. Finally, new streets and squares – and even a mural, in Aielli (9.5.3) – in a renewed toponymic fervor that fuels his ever-expanding Public History.

The figure and work of Giacomo Matteotti was remembered in the official commemoration held in the Chamber of Deputies on May 30, 2024 (9.5.4), in the presence of the President of the Republic and the highest authorities of the state. On June 10, 1924 (9.5.5), while celebrations and events were being held at the main sites of Matteotti’s memory, a new commemorative stamp dedicated to Giacomo Matteotti was unveiled (9.5.6), which follows two previous issues: an Italian one from 1955 (9.5.7) and one from the Republic of San Marino in 2012 (9.5.8). Many philatelic issues have been dedicated to him all over the world. This virtual museum is another way to pay tribute to him and at the same time to pass on his teachings and his powerful legacy to everyone, especially the younger generation. A museum open to new contributions and expansions, it will contribute, this is the hope, to ensure that the legacy of Giacomo Matteotti continues to produce reasoning, reflections, vital impulses, to reaffirm more and more the universal values of democracy, freedom and the defense of rights.