Rovigo showcases the tale of Giacomo Matteotti's sacrifice 100 years after his assassination

An exhibition dedicated to Giacomo Matteotti (Fratta Polesine, 1885 - Rome, 1924), entitled Giacomo Matteotti (1885 -1924), is being held in Rovigo, specifically in Palazzo Roncale from April 5 to July 7, 2024. History of a Free Man, and curated by Stefano Caretti, among the leading scholars of Matteotti and the history of socialism. There are several committees and foundations participating and collaborating in promoting and supporting the exhibition, which falls on anniversary number 100 of the politician’s assassination. These include: the Provincial Committee for the Celebrations of the Centenary of the Death of Giacomo Matteotti, Regione del Veneto, Fondazione Cariparo, the State Archives of Rovigo, the Veneto Regional Museums Directorate of the Ministry of Culture, the Filippo Turati Foundation for Historical Studies in Florence and the Giacomo Matteotti Foundation in Rome.

Through documents never before exhibited, the exhibition evokes the activities Matteotti, an opponent of fascism, carried out as a public administrator in different realities of the Rovigo area, such as his engagement in union and parliamentary activity and as secretary of the United Socialist Party. The Salce Collection National Museum in Treviso, provides a series of posters that document how much the Matteotti affair affected Italy at the time. The aim of the exhibition is to redefine the figure of the politician, removing him from an abstract representation and giving him back the body of his real presence in places, in human relations, and in ideal and cultural choices. The exhibition thus develops as a narrative through images and documents that manage, with their visual immediacy, to reconstruct a life lived in the totality of civic engagement. His portrayal as an organizer of leagues and cooperatives, local administrator, deputy in Parliament in the irreducible opposition to Fascism, and finally secretary of the United Socialist Party, aims to restore a new and concrete image of Giacomo Matteotti.

“Few politicians have been able to inspire,” Professor Caretti points out, “entire generations and arouse such profound and lasting echoes, even abroad, as Matteotti, but few have been both glorified and less well known. Certainly it has somewhat harmed the understanding of Matteotti’s complex personality that the mythical, and therefore abstract, aura has prevailed over the concrete figure of the man. An ideal sublimation that has focused exclusively on the martyr, the victim, the apostle over the hero, thus blurring the true traits of the character, favoring his metamorphosis into an essentially ethical symbol and sacrificing the human depth and historical significance of his work.”

Rovigo showcases the tale of Giacomo Matteotti's sacrifice 100 years after his assassination

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