«I don't know about you, but this Matteotti is cordially on the f**k to me. She stuffs her mouth with social justice and lives in lavish luxury. Cars, holidays in the mountains, big hotels, trips to Europe. All things that the workers and laborers so dear to him don't even see with binoculars». So he could write in 1915, on his Facebook page, a miller from Polesine with his left hand ingratiated. And he would have garnered a lot of "likes" by shooting zero at the target of his hatred of him.
«Just think that here the Matteotti family owns 156 hectares of land and a princely villa in Fratta. When Giacomo has to go to Bologna, he goes down to the Baglioni, in Rome he stays at the Flora, a four-star hotel in via Veneto. In conclusion, the prototype of radical chic. Those of the Catholic weekly "Il Popolo" are right, calling him "millionaire socialist" he was born in "furry revolutionary”. Many predict that he will make a career in politics, will soon become part of the caste, and thus to the already substantial inherited wealth he will be able to add the sumptuous allowance as a parliamentarian.
It is legitimate to ask how you reconcile all this with the ideas you are preaching. If he cares so much about laborers, why doesn't he take some into his own house? Instead of making us pay more taxes to support them, why don't you give them some of your land? Why doesn't it rather deal with the small, run-down traders or the white-collar fathers of families who don't make ends meet, all people forgotten by the ruling elite?
But there is someone worse than Giacomo, and he is (or rather was, because he died years ago) his father Jerome. An unscrupulous businessman, a landowner. Someone insinuates that he lent money to local farmers, pocketing the interest. Listen to what I read months ago in a newspaper: “Those who have lived among the people must know the loan sharks very well: in Polesine, in Lombardy, in Friuli I have always found them the same: greedy and inhuman. I met them, Dr. Matteotti must have also met them, who has been living among the proletariat of Polesine for several years". A deadly shot. And more recently, the same newspaper wrote: "Polesan socialism has a rich millionaire among its ranks... Who, while giving the best advice to others, rents out his lands at a high price". “The millionaire Matteotti enjoys life splendidly with the thousand bills accumulated by his father”. But the heaviest title came out the other day: "Matteotti lends to 2%", where with a graphic trick 2 becomes 20, that is a usury rate, and the name of the son and that of the father end up confusing. We have no proof and maybe it's just slander, what is certain is that Girolamo, rest his soul, had made his money in an unclear way.
Instead, do you want to put Alessandro Mussolini, the father of Benito, the honest blacksmith of Predappio? Yes, he made his living by the sweat of his brow. One of the people, one of us."
NOTE: The information reported is taken from the book by Gianpaolo Romanato, Un italiano diverse. Giacomo Matteotti, (Longanesi, 2011)
