On 10 June 1924, around 16,30 pm, near his Roman home, on the Lungotevere Arnaldo da Brescia Giacomo Matteotti secretary of the PSU (the party founded by the reformists of Filippo Turati, after their expulsion from the PSI, in the Congress of Rome held in the first days of October 1922 ) was kidnapped and loaded into a car, by a team of fascists, belonging to a sort of secret political police, emblematically called the ECSC. They were led by Amerigo Dumini, a "bravo" of the regime linked to Benito Mussolini's staff and in particular to Cesare Rossi, a sort of spokesman for the Duce (who forced his resignation when the investigations began to highlight his connections with Dumini). On the matter, Rossi, who fled to France, even prepared a memorial that put Mussolini himself in difficulty.
Matteotti was born in Fratta Polesine (Rovigo) in 1885, a lawyer, he had distinguished himself in labor struggles against landowners. During the Great War, he had been exempt from military service as the only son of a widowed mother, but being a neutralist militant he had been subjected to confinement. Then he had been elected in his constituency for three consecutive legislatures and had proved himself a serious and committed deputy, attentive in examining the dossiers and had asked for parole 106 times. On several occasions he had been victim of gang violence that she was particularly furious against him precisely because he was an educated person and of bourgeois origin. Matteotti was killed immediately after the kidnapping, inside the car.
His killers were identified, tried (defended by Roberto Farinacci the boss of Cremona) and convicted of manslaughter because – they claimed – Matteotti had defended himself. His body was accidentally discovered two months later where he had been hastily buried.
His fate was sealed by a historic speech which, on May 30, Matteotti carried out in the Chamber - standing up to very harsh protests and interruptions - to denounce, documenting a series of concrete cases, the climate of intimidation and violence where elections had been held that year. Matteotti himself finally admitted that he had signed his death sentence: “I, I made my speech. Now you prepare the funeral speech for me”.
But many historians argue that there were other reasons that determined the decision to suppress it by order of Mussolini himself. Through his international acquaintances (especially in England) Matteotti would have come into possession of evidence of a Sinclair Oil bribe ring related to the oil traffic in which Arnaldo, Mussolini's brother, was involved. So much so that it was believed that the bag that Matteotti was carrying with him on the day of the kidnapping - and which was never found - contained the documents proving his involvement in thatAffair.
On June 26, the opposition deputies launched the political initiative which was defined as “the Aventine Hill” which consisted in deserting the work of Parliament until justice had been completed for the Matteotti case. The discovery of the body caused a lot of emotion throughout Italy. The government wobbled, until the same Mussolini assumed responsibility before the Chamber of what happened in a speech of 3 January 1925: "Well, I hereby declare, in the presence of this Assembly and in the presence of all the Italian people, that I assume, I alone, the political, moral, historical responsibility for what happened ”. Thus, Mussolini took matters back into his hands.
The Aventine protest was unsuccessful and, after about two years, on 9 November 1926 the Chamber of Deputies resolved the forfeiture of the 123 Aventine deputies. That protest was intended to urge the King to take an initiative, thus resolving the crisis in the institutional sphere. It was an initiative which soon turned out to be wrong because it did not take into account that that political situation had been arrived at with the complicity of the Sovereign. Matteotti was married to the poet Velia Titta (Titta Ruffo's sister) with whom he had two sons Matteo and Giancarlo, also engaged in politics in democratic Italy, especially the first (who was a parliamentarian and minister of the PSD). On another occasion he had pronounced a phrase that would prove prophetic: “Kill me too, but you will never kill the idea that is in me”.
