Homage from the Chamber to Matteotti, the name and a plaque on his seat in the Chamber

“You want to push us back. We defend the free sovereignty of the Italian people, to whom we send the highest greetings and believe we are reclaiming their dignity by asking the elections council to postpone the elections affected by violence”. It was the May 30, 1924 when Giacomo Matteotti thus he closed his speech in the House to denounce the fraud and violence that had accompanied the elections on April 6.

Words that the secretary of the Socialist Unity Party he commented immediately afterwards with that phrase, “I have given my speech, now you prepare the funeral speech for me”, which foretold the ambush of the fascist squad that killed him on June 10th. Today, the name of Giacomo Matteotti is imprinted on the seat which the deputy also occupied on the day of that speech.

A solemn ceremony, opened by the words of the President of the Chamber, Lorenzo Fontana – “those words still resonate today as a heartfelt appeal in defense of freedom against any authoritarian drift”, he notes – and culminated in the unveiling of theengraving on the backrest and plaque which, on the bench, reads: “From this bench the socialist deputy Giacomo Matteotti delivered the historic speech of 30 May 1924 in defense of the free Parliament and against the intimidation and fascist violence that would cost him his life”. A moment greeted first by the minute of silence requested of the Chamber by Fontana himself, and then by the applause of the chamber standing.

Fontana: “Further due tribute from the Chamber to the memory”

“102 years have passed since the murder of the Honorable Giacomo Matteotti. It seems like a distant time, but his memory remains alive. The Chamber of Deputies pays a further and due tribute to his memory, in memory of his famous speech delivered in this Chamber on 30 May 1924, which cost him his life. It does so with a plaque now affixed to his seat, in implementation of the agenda presented by my colleague Dori on the occasion of the approval of the internal budget of the Chamber and accepted unanimously by the Office of the President. Those words still resonate today as a heartfelt appeal in defense of freedom against any authoritarian drift”.

It is the president of the Chamber of Deputies, Lorenzo Fontana, who said it on the occasion of the commemoration of Giacomo Matteotti, with the unveiling of a plaque on his seat. Fontana also adds that “Matteotti that day did not only denounce the fraud and abuse of power in the April 1924 elections. He did much more. I openly exposed the climate of intimidation, aggressions and prevarications carried out by fascism to suffocate every dissenting voice. Matteotti was among the first to clearly understand the serious threat that loomed over democratic institutions and civil and political liberties. He identified squadrism as the armed wing of an unscrupulous regime, which prevented the free expression of popular sovereignty. And he openly accused the Mussolini government of basing its consensus on the systematic use of violence.”

“The tragic epilogue of that story – he further notes – is clearly engraved in the collective memory of our country. And it reminds us that the sacrifice of valiant men like Giacomo Matteotti was not in vain. We owe the rebirth of Italy after the long twenty years of dictatorship to their tenacity and moral intransigence. The democratic society of today is the result of the courageous choices of those who preceded us. Reflecting on such dark pages of our history, after a century, is not It’s a simple commemorative exercise.” “It is a call to safeguard those inviolable values ​​of justice, freedom and human dignity that nourish the roots of our civil coexistence”, concludes Fontana.