The murder of Giacomo Matteotti

On 23 April 1924, Italian Socialist MP Giacomo Matteotti arrived in London to rally support with Labour against the fascist government in Italy. Matteotti was the most vocal opponent of Mussolini in the Italian Parliament. Less than two months later he would be kidnapped and killed in Rome by a facist squad just days after exposing in Parliament violence and fraud during the 1924 Italian general election. His murder would be a turning point in Italian and European history as it allowed Mussolini to finally suppress Italian democracy and start his 20-year dictatorship. In December 1926, copies of the preliminary inquest over Matteotti’s murder smuggled to London by Italian antifascists were handed in to LSE Library by the exiled Gaetano Salvemini. This was in the attempt to save a trace of the culpability of Mussolini secret police, after a few months earlier in Italy a farce trial with judges loyal to Mussolini had acquitted almost all involved and condemned to minor offences just a few of the members of the squad, who were freed anyway shortly afterwards thanks to an amnesty. These documents remain at LSE Library to this day and are available for all to access. This special seminar on Matteotti's life and the significance of these documents took place at LSE Library on 23 April 2024, and included a viewing of the archive documents. Speakers included:

Alice Gussoni is Lecturer in Italian Language at the University of Oxford, Faculty of Medieval and Modern Languages. She obtained her doctorate at Oxford University with a thesis on Gaetano Salvemini's anti-fascist exile in Britain, subsequently published as Gaetano Salvemini a Londra. Un antifascista in esilio (1925-1934) (Donzelli, 2020). She has written extensively on Salvemini in London and has recently co-edited, with R. Camurri, a special issue of Modern Italy: Gaetano Salvemini: profile of a transnational intellectual (Volume 28 - Special Issue 4 - November 2023). Her research interests span 19th and 20th century history and focus on mobility studies, including political exile and migration from Italy to the United States.

Andrea Pisauro is a lecturer in Psychology at the University of Plymouth and is a member of the Matteotti Committee London, set up by the London branches of Associazione Nazionale Partigiani d’Italia, INCA CGIL advice bureau, Partito Democratico and the cultural association Manifesto di Londra to honour the memory of Matteotti in London, his role in the fight for democracy and his international antifascist legacy. He has also been collaborating with the Matteotti Foundation for which is comparing the documents brought by Salvemini with the originals in Italy.

Luke Cooper is the Director of PeaceRep’s Ukraine programme and an Associate Professorial Research Fellow in International Relations with the Conflict and Civicness Research Group based at LSE IDEAS, the in-house foreign policy think tank at the London School of Economics and Political Science. He has written extensively on nationalism, authoritarianism and the theory of uneven and combined development and is the author of Authoritarian Contagion (Bristol University Press, 2021).

Silvia Gallotti is a qualified Archivist with extensive experience working in higher education, and in the private and public sector. She worked for five years at the British Library where she catalogued the papers of P.G. Woodhouse and Sir Michael Palin, among others. She is currently working at the LSE Library where she manages born-digital archives and is involved in the digitisation of the Matteotti documents.