Monument to Giacomo Matteotti

Giacomo Matteotti was an Italian antifascist politician, MP and secretary of the Socialist Unity Party since 1922. On the afternoon of 10 June 1924, eleven days after addressing a ringing denunciation of the Fascist Party to the Chamber, he was assaulted by a fascist squad on the Lungotevere Arnaldo da Brescia, not far from his Roman apartment. He was forced into a car and was probably assassinated inside the car itself: his body was found in a wood not far from the city more than two months later, on 16 August.

In 1974, 50 years after his murder, a monument in memory of Giacomo Matteotti was erected near the site of his abduction, financed by a fund-raising campaign promoted by the Italian Socialist Party. The sculptor is Iorio Vivarelli, an artist animated by a profound ethicality and particularly sensitive to the themes of civil commitment and the defense of freedom, also due to his personal experience of long imprisonment in concentration camps between 1943 and 1946.

The abstract sculpture is entirely made of bronze and consists of two parts symbolizing hope at a tragic moment in history: a tall slender spire, resembling a leaf and, along the ground, a tangle reminiscent of a bramble of prunus, bone or human tissue. A plaque facing the street is engraved with a phrase Matteotti is said to have uttered shortly before being assassinated: “Uccidete pure me, ma l’idea che è in me non l’ucciderete mai”, “Kill me if you want, but the idea within me – you’ll never kill it”. The title given by the sculptor to his work, “L’idea, la morte” (The idea, the death), is inspired by this very phrase.

Confirming the symbolic value of the work, several other commemorative plaques were placed at different times at the foot of the monument.