Come learn about the tragic assassination and momentous impact of Matteotti, the man Mussolini feared the most.

Drop in to the Library Gallery to see the Giacomo Matteotti transcripts, and then join us for a seminar to hear from a range of speakers about the significance of these incredible documents!

Drop-in: 5pm to 7:30pm
Seminar: 6pm to 7pm

Who was Matteotti and what are his transcripts?

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 fascist 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 to LSE by the exiled Gaetano Salvemini. This was an 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.

On the 100th anniversary of Matteotti's arrival in London this seminar will look at the history of how those documents arrived at LSE, their historical significance in proving the premeditation of the murder and the direct link between the fascist squad and Mussolini’s government and in testifying the significance of Matteotti’s memory among European antifascists. We will also discuss the significance of Matteotti’s trip to London where he was provided with evidence related to a scandal of corruption of fascist ministers linked to a concession to the American Sinclair Oil to extract oil from central and southern Italy. He will denounce this scandal in his latest known piece of writing, an article in English for the magazine English Life, published posthumously in July 2024, where he responded to an article of Mussolini on the previous issue of the same magazine dealing with the use of violence in politics and the legacy of Machiavelli.

Matteotti deserves global recognition for his attempts to foster international solidarity against fascism across Europe. His legacy would last long after his death and would go far beyond the Italian borders. A legacy spanning two decades, with the creation in 1926 of the Matteotti Fund, later the International Solidarity Fund, by the Labour and Socialist International and, in London, the Women's International Matteotti Committee founded by Sylvia Pankhurst in 1932, and of course in Italy among the partisan brigades named after him in the Italian Resistance that brought about Liberation from Nazi fascism. Considering the rise of far right and illiberal parties across and beyond Europe over recent years, Matteotti's fight for democracy is of great value for today.

Speaker and chair bios for seminar (6pm to 7pm)

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.

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.

Amy King is Senior Lecturer in Modern European History at the University of Bristol. Her recent publications include an article on the uses of Matteotti's memory during the fall of Fascism and the construction of the antifascist Republic, and a book about far-right memory culture over the last 50 years titled The Politics of Sacrifice: Remembering Italy's Rogo di Primavalle. Amy's presentation will address commemoration of Matteotti around the world in the years immediately after his death, and the place of his memory as a foundation of international antifascism.

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). 

The British Library of Political and Economic Science (@LSELibrary) was founded in 1896, a year after the London School of Economics and Political Science. It has been based in the Lionel Robbins Building since 1978 and houses many world class collections, including the Women's Library and Hall-Carpenter Archives.