In 1872, just eleven years after the unification of Italy, english writer and journalist Jessie White Mario, among the most important documentarians of the Risorgimento and a supporter of the cause of Italian unification (“Miss Hurricane” Giuseppe Mazzini had called her), visited Polesine (photos 1.1.1, 1.1.2, 1.1.3, 1.1.4, 1.1.5, 1.1.6) after the Po River overflowed its banks in the Ferrara area, flooding thousands and thousands of acres. So he reports in one of his first major “social surveys”.

“What permanent, absolute misery, endured with a patience that tasted of desperate peace, patience of people who hoped for nothing from anyone on earth! And I was an eyewitness to the fact that the Carabinieri and the engineers themselves had to force families out of perilous houses, the women saying, ‘Better to die drowned all at once, than to die one by one of starvation, hardship, or typhus”.

Later on, White (1.1.7) will again and actively deal with peasant struggles in the Polesine, particularly during the dramatic events related to the La boje revolt. In those same years, in addition to expressing his solidarity with the Polesine peasants for the inhumane conditions in which they were living, he also supported the “doctor of the poor and dispossessed” Nicola Badaloni, who was arrested during the riots, and encouraged him to run for office in the elections that, two years later, would bring him to Parliament to champion the cause of his chosen land. It returns to the social issue in Polesine in the late 1980s in relation to an issue that was debated at the time and the subject of close political confrontation: the issue of abandoned childhood, which had grown exponentially in those years in areas where economic and social degradation was strongest.

After denouncing the miserable state of the brephanages in major northern cities and advocating for the closure of “ruote”, which were an incentive to abandon infants, he stigmatized the abuses associated with “misunderstood charities”, which produced a very high mortality rate in abandoned infancy-a veritable, he wrote, “legal infanticide”. In comparison, White cites the example of the “small, patriotic” province of Rovigo, which had championed “the cause of abandoned children in general and illegitimate children in ispecie”. As early as 1876 Rovigo had closed the wheel and decided to abolish its brefotrophy, entrusting abandoned children to public charity.

Further confirmation of the miserable situation in which the Polesine lands and its peasants found themselves comes from the report written by the parliamentarian to Emilio Morpurgo in 1882, close to the great flooding of the Adige River and two years before the outbreak of the “la boje” riots:

“Houses are not provided with cesspools in the whole province […] Even when the hovel is not close to collapsing, or does not deserve the name of haystack, exposed equally to the frosts of winter, and the summer arsure, windows cannot be said to be such, and the bare earth holds place for the floor. Nine times out of ten the unfortunate dwellers slumber in this very sad nest side by side, without regard to sex or distinction of age […]” (1.1.8, 1.1.9).

Chancellor of the University of Padua and an advocate of the need for state intervention in the countryside, he had already described the peasants’ hovels a few years earlier in a pamphlet printed in Padua:

“In the Veneto region there are entire villages composed of hovels, made of reeds smeared with lotus and covered with straw, fragmented by marshes and rice fields, where a single room serves all the needs of a family. These houses would be better suited for den of beasts, than for dwelling of man”.

To restore us to the conditions in which Polesine and its peasants found themselves at the end of the 19th century (photos 1.2.1, 1.2.2, 1.2.3, 1.2.4) the words of Nicola Badaloni (1.2.5), deputy of the Kingdom of Italy for the extreme left and then senator, are illuminating. As well as in his numerous writings, Badaloni passed on his political and civic experience and his knowledge of Polesine through an interview collected by Adolfo Rossi, an Italian journalist, writer and diplomat, on June 9, 1901, in Trecenta, where the “honorable”, mild-mannered and simple-mannered as he is described, practiced with dedication as a conduit doctor.

His words sketch a dramatic portrait, nevertheless confident in the promise of a better future and built on a social solidarity that, thanks to workers’ organizations, would bring, even in that desolate land of abject poverty, civil and moral redemption, the sun of the future.

Badaloni recalled how “Leagues of Resistance” had begun to be talked about since 1898 and how since then, after initial difficulties and thanks to the activism of the local Socialist Circle and the adoption of the model of the Improvement Leagues springing up in the Mantua area, the new peasant organizations had spread rapidly bringing immediate and practical benefits on both the organizational and pay fronts. The Leagues, Badaloni pointed out, had already increased “the peasant’s meager day” by 15 cents, but not only that, “they also increased morality”, to the point that by now 95 percent of local peasants adhered to the League and practiced mutual aid in a “real explosion of solidarity”.

At the dawn of the twentieth century and crowning an intense proselytizing activity, the Leagues continued to multiply throughout the Polesine to the point that, according to Badaloni’s estimate, “in the province of Rovigo, the associated peasants, among males and females, are already more than twenty thousand”.

“The fact is”, Badaloni points out in the interview, “that the vast majority of the peasants of Trecenta today are socialists and have the clear concept that misery does not depend on the rich. “The gentlemen”, say the peasants, “are looking after their interest and we have to look after ours. If I left or missed tomorrow, socialism would not disappear because of that”.

This, then, is what emerges from the accounts of Rossi, White, Morpurgo and Badaloni – and of so many others who witnessed stories of poverty and social ferment, ignorance and degradation, struggles and achievements – the fermenting reality of Polesine between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. This is the context in which Giacomo Matteotti would find himself operating and experiencing his first fundamental experiences as a local administrator. And this is the land to which, in the second half of the 19th century, the Matteotti family decided to move, coming from Comasine di Peio, in the heart of Trentino.

“So how is your parish doing? – I said to him.
It can’t get any worse! – he answered me maliconically”.

To understand why “it can’t get any worse”, we must first introduce the protagonists of this succinct dialogue. Asking the questions is Adolfo Rossi (photos 1.3.1), an Italian journalist, writer and diplomat, in his youth the protégé of Alberto Mario, Garibaldi’s right-hand man in the Expedition of the Thousand. In 1879 he had left Polesine bound for New York, where he had worked as a journalist for the newspaper “Il Progresso Italo-Americano”, learning the American journalistic style, stringent and effective, precise and “investigative” in verifying sources. To him, an authoritative witness of so many civil and social battles of the young unified state, we owe pages that render to us with rawness the reality of Polesine in those years. Answering his question, “So how is your parish doing?” is Don Giovanni Battista Baroni, parish priest of Villanova del Ghebbo, a town in the heart of Polesine: a municipality of 2,700 inhabitants in the plain between the Adige and the Po, situated on the banks of the Adigetto, 5 kilometers from Lendinara, the capital of the district, and 15 from Rovigo, the capital of the province. It is 1889: Rossi, who had just begun to collaborate with “La Tribuna” (but would shortly leave journalism and become a traveling Inspector of the Commissariat on National Emigration), returns to Polesine to visit relatives and meet the widow of Alberto Mario, Jessie White Mario, a journalist and activist in her turn. The population around Villanova then consisted exclusively of farmers; Rossi wanted to understand, and tell us, what their condition really was. The result would be an extraordinary reportage.

The parish priest explains that the situation has been “steadily worsening” for some time: forty years earlier there were only 1,800 inhabitants of the village “and the very light taxes were not felt at all”. Families had simple, patriarchal customs, and “prosperity was, it may be said, general, and the population steadily increased until it reached the figure of almost 2,700”. Now the situation has drastically changed, the population is no longer growing, marriages are decreasing, there are very few wealthy families, and almost all of them “became miserable”. In the past 36 months, the cleric points out, more than 30 families, more than 150 people in all, have emigrated to America (1.3.2).

Pressed by Rossi, Don Giovanni Battista explains that the first cause of all this is certainly “this terrible increase in taxes of all kinds, which had as its first consequence the general worsening of food”. This is not entirely new, since a first increase in taxes had occurred long ago under Austrian rule; but today, with the Kingdom of Italy, the situation has become untenable: “Now malnourished parents, discontented with themselves and everything, do not care for the rearing of their children; education and instruction are neglected; and so the material deterioration has brought with it the moral one”, and many families literally suffer from hunger.

The parish priest’s, Rossi points out, is not an isolated voice: “In questioning other people in the village, I heard from everyone the same conclusion. In many there is the fear of an imminent general catastrophe. Others are reduced to wishing for a revolution, even a foreign invasion, to persuade themselves that worse than this the shack could not walk. All this is very sad”.

In the following years Adolfo Rossi still offers us valuable accounts of late 19th-century Polesine and the reality of the peasant leagues. In June 1901, the Lendinara-based journalist produced a new series of reports on Polesine (eight articles that appeared in the summer of 1901 in the “Adriatico” and were later reprinted in “La Tribuna” and the “Secolo XIX”) centered on the gradual establishment of the improvement leagues among the peasants: a then highly topical subject since both in Polesine and in the neighboring Mantua area, claim initiatives were underway with agitations and strikes to obtain a revision of wages and working hours in the countryside.

As was his custom, the journalist documented himself carefully: he personally went to the main centers of Polesine and interviewed those who could provide him with reliable first-hand information. Interviewees include Socialist MP Nicola Badaloni and the president of the Tarcento League, Angelo Scarazzati; but there is also no shortage of landowners practicing fairer treatment of land workers and experimenting with new techniques of land management.

Compared to the very harsh reality photographed in 1889, indications of slight but widespread improvements in the rural reality can be seen in Rossi’s last correspondences, due in part to the political action of socialists, Catholics and more enlightened liberals. But living conditions in Polesine remained extremely harsh, and the growth of the migratory phenomenon bears witness to this: by the end of the nineteenth century, the number of Polesans crossing the Ocean in search of fortune could be counted in the thousands. A phenomenon that, however, also lent itself to a positive consideration: for those who stayed, there was certainly more work. Rossi’s reports are closely followed by very attentive audiences and do not go unnoticed. In the newspaper of the Polesine socialists, “La Lotta”, an article with the significant title, An Honest Journalist, is published, which gives credit to the extensive information work carried out by Rossi, even though he was considered “on the opposite side”.

Between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the Kingdom of Italy, a newly unified country but with profound differences between regions, social contexts and administrations, is marked by what is called the “Southern Question”. Posed by many southern intellectuals as the main “national question”, this addresses those distances-such as in “reading, writing and counting”-that cause the huge and obvious cultural and economic imbalances between north and south.

Yet in the young unified State the condition of degradation, neglect and poverty also affected the north, which had within it depressed and desolate areas, ungenerous lands in which extreme poverty took root in a territory stingy with resources, fostering underdevelopment and the desire for revolt. This was certainly the case in that narrow, long tongue of land in southern Veneto that stretches between the Veronese Valleys and the shores of the Adriatic Sea and coincides today with the province of Rovigo: it is the Polesine, bounded by the Adige River to the north and the Po River to the south. A flat land, of marshy origin (as the word itself recalls) whose history has been dramatically marked by disastrous floods over the centuries that have shaped the territory and modified the course of the rivers. Sadly famous remains that of September 1882, which, caused by an overflow of the Adige River, was the first major natural disaster in united Italy.

The uprising of peasants in the Po Valley countryside of the Mantuan and Polesine regions in the early 1880s marks, for some, the birth of the organized peasant movement in the Kingdom of Italy. The La Boje movement, (photos 1.4.1) which owes its name to a Venetian dialect expression indicating impatience with and outburst of reaction to an intolerable situation (“La boje, la boje e de boto la va de fora”, or “boils, boils and suddenly overflows”), originated both from the drama of the flood of 1882 and from the severe depression that had hit agriculture in the previous decade, caused by the international collapse of grain prices. As a result of the crisis, landowners, after soliciting extraordinary support measures from the government, had significantly reduced wages.

After two seasons of increasing difficulties, the protest exploded in 1884 in the Polesine and then extended to the Mantua area, in an area that had already been plagued for years by pellagra, a disease caused by poor nutrition. Aggregating the protest were two organizations: the Mutual Aid Society among the peasants of the province of Mantua, founded by the radical Eugenio Sartori, and the General Association of Italian Peasants, with a decidedly socialist orientation, directed by former Garibaldian Francesco Siliprandi and peasant Giuseppe Barbiani. The farmworkers’ positions were also supported in some local newspapers that immediately espoused the reasons for the struggle: among them “La Favilla”, “La libera Parola”, and “Il Pellagroso”.

The quantum leap in peasant protest, which had immediately met with open hostility from the agrarians and the authorities, leads to a strike that lasts for months and provokes a harsh reaction. On the night of March 26, 1885, more than 150 peasants and leaders were arrested, about 20 of whom, accused of serious crimes such as attack on institutions, massacre and looting, were remanded for trial (1.4.2). The proceedings began on February 1886 in Venice and had great resonance in the public opinion of the time: for the daily newspaper “Il Messaggero” in Rome came from an outstanding reporter, Andrea Costa (1.4.3), a member of the Revolutionary Socialist Party and then already a member of Parliament. And the charge is very serious: “having among themselves and with the Provincial Mutual Aid Society and the Workers’ Federation of Mantua, both with statutes, regulations and rates; both with speeches in official meetings and with writings; with excitements and strikes, attacked the internal security of the State, by means of acts having for their object to bring devastation, massacre and pillage in various municipalities of the province of Mantua”. The defendants face up to life imprisonment and hard labor for life.

It was one of the first political trials of united Italy, which went down in history for a courageous sentence: on March 27, 1886, the Venice Court of Assizes acquitted all the defendants with a full formula. The courtroom rejoices, in the city “thousands and thousands of people” wait with “the flags of the workers’ associations, the bands and fanfares […] the bands sing the hymn of redemption, the crowd bursts into “hurrah!” recounts the national press. The whole affair shows how much the consciousness of the peasants had changed, who, instead of going to storm the bakeries and town halls as in the days of the millstone tax, began to organize, demanding better rates and compensation.

In the end, the results of the strike are also positive economically: the agrarians grant the land workers 20-22 percent of the harvest instead of 10-15 percent, as was the case until then.

This is how the “slogan” of the peasants of Rovigo and Mantua, born in the domestic world and in the kitchens, became first a battle cry, then of resistance in the struggle, and finally of victory.

A brief victory in fact, barely a truce in the tug-of-war between peasants and agrarians, land workers and “bosses”, but representing an important milestone in the history of peasant organization. Socialist proselytism and Catholic solidarism would work on this in the following years, nurturing an awareness that would transform individual episodes of rebellion into political culture and a conscious desire to participate. Here began that radical change in the figure of the peasant, at the time the outcast par excellence, seen as the ignorant “brother of the ox” and who would discover himself, a few years later, the brother of the worker.

In this process Giacomo Matteotti – who was in Fratta Polesine on May 22, 1885, a few weeks after the arrests – 4is, in his Polesine, a major player.

It is a long and complex history of reformist socialism that was born and developed, always vital and always a minority, in the great house of socialism from its origins (photos 1.5.1). This can already be glimpsed on February 20, 1867, when Marx drafts the Instructions to Delegates for the First Congress of the International, an ideal agon in which the different souls of the left of the time immediately confronted and clashed: Socialists, Anarchists, Mazzinian Republicans and Marxists. The gap between ideality and political praxis that were difficult to reconcile was sanctioned in Paris in 1889 with the birth of the Second International, which, while proclaiming May 1 a World Labor Day, definitively ousted the anarchist faction. The wall becomes even deeper and more explicit three years later at the Congress of the Social Democratic Party of Germany, the SPD, held in 1891 in Erfurt. It is in the Erfurter Programm that the distinction between the “maximum program”, hence the term “maximalist”, and the “minimum program” is affirmed: the former, which constitutes the theoretical basis and political horizon of reference, is drafted by the German philosopher and theorist of orthodox Marxism Karl Kautsky; the “minimum” program is drafted by the future father of revisionism Eduard Bernstein and consists of a 15-point claim manifesto, ranging from universal suffrage to freedom of expression and association.

The eternal confrontation-sometimes dialectically fruitful, far more often lacerating and divisive-between maximalists and reformists stems from there and perhaps, in germinal form, in the very idea that leads toward the Future Sun.

It was in this climate of ideal, political and organizational ferment – which had a strong international and internationalist background – that movements and associational structures were born in Italy that would later give rise to the Socialist Party. In 1872, the Congress of Italian Workers’ Societies was held in Rome; 10 more years later-and the 10 years before the Genoa Congress-the Italian Workers’ Party was born in Milan on May 17, 1882 (1.5.2) on the initiative of the local Circolo Operaio and the magazine “La Plebe” by Enrico Bignami and Osvaldo Gnocchi Viani, which in 1892, in Genoa precisely, would merge into the new Partito dei Lavoratori Italiani, which would shortly thereafter take the name Partito Socialista (1.5.3, 1.5.4).

These were years in which, in Italy, the young socialist party consolidated its consensus (1.5.5, 1.5.6) and won its first representations in the lower chamber of the Parliament of the Kingdom of Italy: a forum that would contribute to giving wide resonance to socialist policies that would intersect in the following decades with the Giolittian age, giving rise to a very important season for the country’s social progress and for labor legislation, particularly for the protection of women’s and children’s labor. In 1882 Andrea Costa entered Montecitorio, but in the general elections of May 1895 as many as 15 socialists were elected to Parliament, and they were joined by the following year’s by-elections. Filippo Turati (1.5.7).

The socialist movement was gradually spreading through circles and territorial sections, provided itself with permanent headquarters, gave birth to a dense network of local sheets and a daily newspaper – “Avanti!” (1.5.8) was founded in 1896, while the theoretical periodical “Critica Sociale” dates from a few years earlier – and saw its support grow in both political and local elections. Of conserva with socialism a strong cooperative movement developed: the National League was founded in 1889, and union action was consolidated in the network of Chambers of Labor and in the trade federations that in 1906 gave birth to the General Confederation of Labor. At the dawn of the twentieth century, a widespread faith in social progress-no less than human and economic-fueled the hope that the new Century would belong to the socialist world (1.5.9).

The dream of the “kingdom of liberty” passes through a new civil humanism that is welded with positivism’s faith in progress and cements itself in the field of cooperation, which will contribute so much to the fortunes of the Italian left in the first two decades of the new century. In 1902 there were 2,823 cooperative societies registered, with half a million members. In 1914 they reached one million: a number that was already very large in liberal Italy, but which would double in the immediate post-World War I period, in that season of disappointments and hopes, of conquests and clashes that we remember as the “red biennium”: at the end in 1920 the share capital of the League’s member societies was around 600 million lire with a business movement of around one and a half billion (1.5.10, 1.5.11, 1.5.12, 1.5.13).

It is not only the city, with its universe of factories, that constitutes the natural leaven of so much ferment: mobilization also touches the countryside, starting in the Polesine of Giacomo Matteotti, where the Peasant Leagues see exponential growth in the latter part of the nineteenth century and in the following decades. First and foremost, laborers joined the Leagues, but the unionization of sharecroppers, “obligors”, and smallholders soon followed, thanks in part to such outstanding union leaders and organizers as Giacomo Matteotti and Aldo Parini.

It appears from Trentino archives and local history that as early as 1772 the Matteotti family was granted, directly by the prince-bishop of Trento, the usufruct concession of mines near Peio, specifically in the localities of Gardané (or Garzané), Boai, Bandalorsi and Stavion. Beyond the economic value and recognition of entrepreneurial ability, the concession had the value of an investiture: the holders were in fact granted permission to “adorn their houses and ironworks with the coat of arms of the Principality, to bear arms, cut wood and make coal”. Traces of this remain in the ancient Matteotti house in Comasine (photos 1.6.1), in 2015 restored by the municipal administration of Peio (1.6.2), which prominently displays again on the main facade precisely the family coat of arms (1.6.3). In addition to this, the fragment of an ancient fresco depicting the Madonna among the Souls in Purgatory can be glimpsed: the image surmounts the inscription “Passegger che passi per questa via per te recita l’Ave Maria” (“Passer who passes through this street for you recite the Ave Maria”); next to it is written “MATEO MATEOTI F. F. 1763”.

The Val di Peio and the upper Val di Sole knew, thanks to the mining of magnetite and the related iron and copper processing, a long period of prosperity of which there are traces from the fourteenth century and which will last until the beginning of the nineteenth, when progressively the veins go exhausted and the mining activity loses economic interest, while consequently the manufacturing activity related to the metal processing dies out. Peio and its valley will know a new period of prosperity and fame in the second half of the twentieth century thanks to tourism, within the naturalistic area of the Stelvio National Park; just from the overhanging mountain massif descends the very good water “Medio minerale bicarbonate” with a high iron content, which has contributed, together with the thermal activity and the skiing and winter activities, to the new fortune of the territory.

Giacomo Matteotti’s grandparents and great-grandparents were from Comasine, and Matteo Matteotti, Giacomo’s grandfather, commuted for many years between Comasine di Peio and Fratta Polesine, until he died in 1858 during a fight in front of his store. The family was well-to-do, and Matteo was a “cross-border” commuter, because Trentino, incorporated into the County of Tyrol, was then an integral part of the Empire of Austria-Hungary, although the use, including administrative use, and teaching of the Italian language was recognized to its inhabitants. Only at the end of World War I, in 1919, was it annexed to the Kingdom of Italy. Giacomo’s father, Girolamo Stefano, had also been born in Comasine on October 1, 1839.

We do not have documents explaining why the Matteotti family moved from Trentino to Polesine, but the coincidence of dates leaves room for little doubt: the decision to leave Comasine arose in the years when the mining and related manufacturing activities – particularly iron and copper working – in which the Matteotti family had been active for generations, entered a crisis. In the mid-19th century the need arose to find new areas to which to transfer the trade in iron and copper derivatives – hence the generic appellation “calderari” – and grandfather Matteo identified Fratta Polesine as an ideal place to start a new business and invest in real estate, in this he was joined by his son Girolamo Stefano, who carried on and expanded his father’s business and invested in plots of land in the Polesine, achieving a solid economic position. After the annexation of Veneto to Italy, with the plebiscite of 1866 and thanks to the expropriation laws of 1866-67, Girolamo Matteotti in fact increased the family fortune by buying land and church property at auction (the accusation of having built a fortune by lending money at interest, allegedly made against him by his son’s local Catholic adversary press, has never been established). Fortunes slowly grew, and the total value of the family property, which included 150 hectares of farmland, would be estimated in 1925 at 1,203,826 liras. For the time, a very large sum.

In Fratta, Girolamo runs two large stores, where everything is sold: tools for the countryside, seeds, household goods, cookware, textiles. But the family retains austere ways of peasant origin: the children can study and perfect themselves even abroad, and yet the Matteotti house (1.6.4, 1.6.5), still in the mid-1910s, is very simple: single-story – on the first floor, in a small room with tables and shelves, Giacomo Matteotti studied, worked and received visitors – and furnished “modestly”, as Aldo Parini, Giacomo’s friend and collaborator since 1915, when he began to share his socialist and trade union militancy, reports. The Matteotti family home, now the Matteotti House Museum (1.6.6, 1.6.7, 1.6.8), would be enlarged only later, and adorned with furniture salvaged from a noble villa in Ficarolo.

On February 7, 1875, Jerome (1.6.9) marries Lucia Elisabetta Garzarolo (1.6.10), called Isabella. Isabella is from Fratta Polesine, the town where Giacomo and his siblings were born. Seven children in all, four of whom die at an early age. The three remaining are all of socialist views: in addition to Giacomo, who was born on May 22, 1885, Matteo – who worked on and wrote about labor and unemployment (1.6.11) – and Silvio, the youngest of the brothers, who from a young age followed the family activities (1.6.12).

Giacomo’s childhood and early youth flowed quietly. His studies at the “Celio Gymnasium” high school in Rovigo, where he had for a classmate his peer and future deputy Umberto Merlin (after 1945 mayor of Rovigo, in ’46 member of the Constituent Assembly, then minister of the Republic in several governments), ended in June 1903, with excellent grades. In his last years of study he lived with a family in the city and attended the library of the Accademia dei Concordi, the oldest and most renowned cultural institution in Rovigo. Giacomo wants to pursue a career in the humanities and enroll in law, following in his brother Matteo’s footsteps, and then delve into economics. His father, who is no longer with us, would not have approved, but his mother went along with him.Thanks to his affluent family circumstances, he then enrolled at the University of Bologna, Faculty of Law, and here he graduated on November 7, 1907, with 110 with honors, discussing his thesis General Principles of Recidivism with the eminent jurist, later deputy and senator, Alessandro Stoppato, who would always remember his “disciple” with affection. “We became friends, I loved him; and he deserved it for goodness of mind, nobility of intellect, rectitude of character”, Stoppato would recall.

Five years before graduating Giacomo loses his father, Girolamo, who was just 63 years old. A man of hard character, a character that Giacomo inherited, and which in both of them manifested itself in an uncompromising and proud attitude toward himself and others.

Giacomo always remained attached to his father’s memory, and he also left us, in a letter written between 1914 and 1915 to his then fiancée Velia, a particularly intense and affectionate portrait of his mother:

“No, my mom is not tall and does not have black hair. Her hair is white, almost all white, and she doesn’t have much more than her son. At one time it was black yes, and wavy; of one time her black eyes remain, and her eyebrows still thick, and the restlessness that keeps her always on the move, always active, from morning to night, hardly ever a moment sitting. She has had almost no education; but she knows practically more than most men. She is old-fashioned, but nothing modern offends her, and indeed she abhors indolent or sentimental femininity. In some things I resemble her; but in others I resemble my father: in the eyes, the chin, and the hardness of character that had left him alone against the many, hated and slandered often, so that my easy victories of today seem to me the due vindication: it is also a debt which I absolve, it is a hope nurtured since childhood, when I pined not to understand and not to be able”.

When he writes these words Giacomo is 29 years old, and it is clear from his expressions how strong and deep-rooted his relationship with his family of origin was. And yet, beyond physical and character similarities with his parents, the figure who would most influence his life and direct his formation was his older brother Matteo.

The role and example of his brother Matteo emerge powerfully in the confessions that James entrusts to letters addressed to Velia. He writes to his fiancée between December 1914 and January 1915:

“Your call is sweet and strong: within your voice is also the voice of another dear one of mine, the dearest of all”, with obvious reference to Matteo, who has been missing for more than five years now (photos 1.8.1).

A few days later, James returns to intertwine the two great loves of his life: that for his soon-to-be-wife companion and that for his deceased older brother:

“I still have the clear impression from the first times I shook of mine your hand, of your ability to make up above all for this last greatest affection I had lost, to give me back that beneficial sense that the watchful vigilance of him, who loved me, gave me. For perhaps he did not even think that I loved him very much: it was enough for him to relive in me all the anxieties the works the dreams and ambitions of his finished youth, and he surrounded me with that same indulgence that each of us has toward our faults; and none of this he ever told me […]”.

Matteo had been and would always remain more than an example for his younger brother: after the death of his father Girolamo in 1902 when Giacomo was 17 years old, it was Matteo who became his guide and model, both in his studies and in his civic and political engagement.

Born in Fratta Polesine 1876, Gianmatteo, called Matteo, had studied in Venice and Turin, where he had been a fellow student of Luigi Einaudi, under the guidance of Salvatore Cognetti De Martiis. In 1901 he had published in Turin the essay L’assicurazione contro la disoccupazione (Unemployment Insurance), which had won general praise and was also the result of research conducted abroad, in an itinerary of in-depth study that Giacomo, following in his footsteps, would retrace a few years later.

In order to carry out his thesis on “recidivism in law”, the repetition of a crime by one who has previously been convicted with an irrevocable sentence, and which was then a much-debated topic-James in fact traveled to Germany, Austria, Holland, Belgium, France and England, studied French, English and German, and would also have the opportunity in the years to come to put his knowledge to good use: in the study trips he would make before the war, and afterwards for his political activity, thus cultivating a natural cosmopolitan and Europeanist vocation that constitutes one of the most modern and original traits in his personality.

But it is not only in the orientations of study and intellectual training that his brother Matteo exerts his influence: it is he who guides Giacomo toward the socialist ideal and then directs him to the experience of local administrator and active militancy, with a specific focus on education as a tool for the emancipation of the masses. In this, too, the existential itinerary of the two is singularly similar: Matteo alternates between scientific activity and political commitment with the experience of administrator in the territory and is, in the early twentieth century and until his untimely death, mayor of Villamarzana, then provincial councilor in Rovigo and then again president of the Mutual Aid Society of Fratta Polesine.

When he died prematurely of tuberculosis in Liguria, Nervi, on March 18, 1909, an essay of his on Pauperism and Unemployment and a research paper on the early Carbonari of Fratta remained unfinished.

A year later James published Recidivism. Critical review essay with statistical data which developed and expanded the discussion of the dissertation, and the dedication was prefixed to the text:

“To the memory of Matteo, my brother and friend, who with an affectionate eye protected the growth of these pages, and could not see its completion”.