Montecitorio, the seat of Italy’s parliament, is presented as more than a legislative chamber: it is a stage on which the country’s rival claims to represent the people confront one another. Its most striking scenes move between ceremonial royal authority, socialist defiance, Matteotti’s evidence-based accusations of fascist violence, and Mussolini’s performance from the extreme-right benches. The changing occupancy of the hall—first a semicircle divided by a mass departure, then a sparsely attended chamber, and later a packed spectacle—makes the institution’s political vulnerability visible.

Parliamentary space and public ritual

At the opening of a new legislature, Montecitorio gathers approximately five hundred representatives before Vittorio Emanuele III, who is to inaugurate the session with the customary crown speech. The royal throne has been set where the presiding officer’s bench would normally stand, with cuirassiers holding unsheathed swords on either side. This arrangement makes the encounter between monarch and parliament bodily and ceremonial: the deputies and senators are not merely hearing the king’s speech but are assembled to meet their sovereign in person.

The chamber’s social composition sharpens the meaning of that ceremony. There are 156 socialist deputies, almost all new to parliament; many are sons of workers, carters, and farm laborers. The narrative stresses that for many of these men, a painted canvas had previously been something encountered only on a church altar. Their presence in the national legislature brings people who had long been treated as subjects into a room organized around royal authority and political representation. The inauguration thus carries a promise of inclusion even before the socialists decide to reject its terms.

At 10:28, a royal valet opens the small door on the right. The representatives rise and cheer, “Long live the king!” The socialist deputies in three sections on the left remain seated. Their stillness interrupts the expected choreography; the cuirassiers tighten their grip on their swords before the meaning of the pause becomes clear. The socialists are leaving, refusing the meeting with the king and disavowing him. Montecitorio’s layout gives the refusal a visible form: a political division already present in the semicircle becomes an action witnessed by the entire assembly.

The walkout and its uncertain aftermath

Nicola Bombacci leads the departing deputies. Disheveled and scruffily bearded, he passes the throne, looks directly at Vittorio Emanuele III, and calls out, “Long live the socialist republic!” The newspapers’ nickname for Bombacci, the king of preferential votes, reflects his large personal following in the Bologna district. The account gives the departure a scale beyond the chamber: with Bombacci alone, apart from the other socialist deputies, more than one hundred thousand Italians are said to leave Montecitorio. The king is left delivering the crown speech to a half-empty hall.

Outside in the piazza, the dissidents congratulate and embrace one another. Their laughter and exhilaration embody their immediate belief that a free and just life is becoming possible; in the winter sunlight, they appear as representatives of a people newly reborn. But the scene’s emotional rise is abruptly limited. The euphoria lasts only seconds before deputies and senators recognize that they have no plan for the remainder of the day. The socialists have staged a powerful rejection of the existing order, yet the walkout has not supplied them with a practical course of action. Montecitorio’s political theatre therefore holds both triumph and uncertainty: the institution can be refused in a memorable gesture, but departure alone does not settle what should replace it.

Matteotti makes violence a parliamentary question

The chamber later becomes the setting for a different kind of opposition. On January 31, 1921, the session on internal politics follows a report concerning a scandal over supply depots in Libya. The hall is nearly empty: no more than seventy deputies are present, almost all seated on the left, and Giacomo Matteotti is the first of the fifty-six members there to speak. When the presiding officer, De Nicola, gives him the floor, Matteotti addresses a room whose elderly government members had been slumped in their benches. His speech brings the denunciation of fascist violence openly onto the parliamentary agenda for the first time.

Matteotti describes an armed organization whose members, leaders, and headquarters are publicly known. Its declared purpose, he argues, is to use violence, retaliation, threats, and arson against workers accused of acting against employers or the bourgeois class. He calls it “a perfect organization of private justice.” The force of the accusation lies partly in its insistence on public evidence: the violence is not represented as a hidden disturbance beyond the reach of politics, but as the work of identifiable gangs operating openly. Matteotti then rejects the government’s presentation of itself as an impartial guardian of public order, accusing Giovanni Giolitti’s government of complicity in the violence.

That charge marks a break as well as a denunciation. The narrative presents Giolitti’s response as a moment in which Matteotti disavows the government’s institutional claim to guarantee rights and freedom, severing what tie might still have connected socialism to the state. The speech’s repeated refusal is condensed in the words, “We ask for nothing, we beg for nothing.” In the chamber, the phrase reverberates as a final word: the opposition is no longer seeking reassurance from the government it has accused.

On the afternoon of March 10, Matteotti takes the floor again to denounce fascist violence. He describes fascist trucks arriving at night in villages, hamlets, and the countryside, accompanied by leaders of local agrarian associations who know how to find the homes of league leaders and the small job centers. The locations and circumstances matter to his account: the violence is organized, directed at rural labor institutions, and enabled by local knowledge. Matteotti calls it “assault, by an organization of thugs” and says it is no longer political struggle but barbarism. The chamber applauds, but his second denunciation is absorbed into the larger climate of European civil conflict; recognition inside parliament does not itself stop the attacks.

A chamber claimed by opposing political projects

On December 2, Matteotti speaks for a third time against fascist terror in the Polesine, now in the presence of fascist deputies elected in April with Giolitti’s support. The timing gives the confrontation an added edge: Benito Mussolini’s promises from the previous day still echo in the hall, while the fascists have retracted the pacification pact on November 14. The account connects the reversal to the squads’ failure to overcome proletarian resistance in the streets of Rome. Matteotti distinguishes the decline of large punitive raids from the continuation of smaller attacks on villages and peasants’ homes. For provincial squadristi, he says, the pact has amounted to no more than “a scrap of paper”; their own combat bulletins claim responsibility for attacks. Clubs, revolvers, muskets, grenades, and gasoline make the threat concrete. Parliamentary debate records a conflict that continues beyond its walls.

Mussolini’s first parliamentary appearance offers a contrasting use of the same institution. He takes a seat on the last bench on the right, isolated from the other deputies. The narrative figures him as a vulture on its perch, alone in a position associated with ambush and counter-ambush. In his opening remarks he embraces the location rather than disowning it: he announces support for reactionary proposals and describes his speech as anti-democratic and anti-socialist, adding that anti-socialism also means opposition to Giolitti. His first thirty minutes are devoted to attacking Giolitti’s foreign policy, including what Mussolini presents as a failure to protect Italian presence on the eastern borders and the sacrifice of Montenegro’s independence.

The parliamentary project he advances reaches beyond that attack. Fascism, in his account, is a synthesis capable of absorbing liberalism through violence, forging Italians into a single national identity, and directing national greatness toward empire. Even the Roman Church is included within this imperial vision, replacing what he calls foolish anticlericalism. Montecitorio thus hosts not only the exposure of political violence but also a speech that seeks to recast violence as the means by which an entirely new national order will be made.

The contrast between the hall’s scenes is especially stark when the chamber later fills for the arrival of the new government. Senators, diplomats, former deputies, elegantly dressed spectators, and common people crowd the galleries and corridors; the spectacle is festive, and the cameras focus on the presidential desk. The earlier near-empty chamber and the packed parliamentary hall are not simply opposite images of attendance. Together they show Montecitorio functioning as a contested public stage: a site where refusal, accusation, and the performance of authority compete for the right to define Italy’s future, even as the violence Matteotti names continues outside the proceedings.