Parliament of the Kingdom of Italy

The Parliament of the Kingdom of Italy is the central institutional stage on which the book traces the transformation of Italian politics from postwar confrontation into fascist domination. Its chamber hosts the king’s formal address, socialist repudiation of the monarchy, Benito Mussolini’s parliamentary debut, and Giacomo Matteotti’s denunciations of fascist violence. Yet the continued presence of deputies, votes, speeches, and official procedures does not ensure meaningful political competition: as intimidation expands and opposition withdraws, the parliament remains visible while its capacity to restrain power steadily weakens.

The chamber and its rituals

The narrative introduces Parliament on December 1, 1919, as the new legislature gathers at Montecitorio for the king’s speech. Before the proceedings begin, socialist deputies look up at Aristide Sartorio’s monumental frieze: fifty large encaustic canvases, stretching for more than a hundred yards and populated by over two hundred human and animal figures. Its images of young Italy’s virtues and national history form a public vision of a unified country. Below it, the seating arrangements immediately show how unsettled that unity is. The socialists occupy the first three sections on the left, wearing red carnations, and even Giovanni Giolitti gives up his customary seat among them. The ceremony has a prescribed order, but the chamber’s physical arrangement already records a change in political allegiance.

When Vittorio Emanuele III enters, approximately five hundred representatives rise to acclaim him, except for the socialist bloc, which remains seated. The deputies stand only after the king has taken his place and the assembly has been invited to sit; then they leave together. Nicola Bombacci leads them past the throne and proclaims a socialist republic. The king delivers his address to a half-empty hall. Outside, the departing deputies initially celebrate their action as the beginning of a just new order, but the moment of triumph gives way to uncertainty: they have no plan for what to do next. Later that day nationalist attackers target socialists in the streets, and Giacinto Menotti Serrati is taken to security headquarters and beaten. A general strike follows; the account records about ten deaths in several cities, adding to the deaths from political clashes earlier in 1919. Parliament’s dramatic breach of royal protocol thus coincides with a wider conflict that its symbolic gestures do not resolve.

A forum for confrontation

Parliamentary speech becomes another means of contesting the direction of the country. During the factory and labor conflicts of 1920, Claudio Treves tells the chamber that revolution is an epoch rather than a single day, describing it as a gradual process of erosion and sudden change. His speech gives public form to the socialist movement’s unresolved divisions over whether and how to seek power. The parliament is not simply a setting for formal government: it is where rival accounts of political time and political possibility are stated, even as strikes and confrontations continue beyond its walls.

In 1921, Benito Mussolini enters the chamber as a deputy and takes a seat on the far-right back bench, a position presented as both conspicuous and isolated. On June 21, he opens his first parliamentary speech by identifying it as anti-democratic and anti-socialist, and then makes clear that his opposition also extends to Giovanni Giolitti, his recent electoral ally. He attacks Giolitti’s foreign policy, accusing him of failing to defend Italy’s standing and interests on its eastern borders. The speech demonstrates that Mussolini intends to carry his political struggle into Parliament rather than submit to the parliamentary management Giolitti had hoped to impose. Earlier, during the April election campaign, the prospect of fascists joining the national blocs had met resistance from Luigi Albertini; his eventual acceptance is presented as a sign that fascism has crossed from street violence into the parliamentary arena. Entry into that arena, however, does not moderate the movement’s methods or settle its conflict with liberal politics.

The chamber also gives opponents a place to document the effects of coercion. On December 2, 1921, Giacomo Matteotti speaks against fascist terror in the Polesine. The preceding debate has included Mussolini’s list of fascist dead, while Matteotti’s intervention insists that violence against political opponents must also be addressed. In the surrounding account, the government’s attempts to regulate armed groups meet defiance: after Prime Minister Ivanoe Bonomi issues a circular restricting their activity, Michele Bianchi declares that National Fascist Party sections and combat squads are inseparable. The directive is publicly printed in Il Popolo d’Italia. Parliament remains a forum in which abuses can be named, but the government’s formal authority is increasingly unable to make its orders effective.

Procedure under pressure

The vulnerability of parliamentary government is exposed again in October 1922, when the government prepares a state-of-siege proclamation in response to the fascist advance. Ivanoe Bonomi sends written orders for Rome’s defense, directs prefects to arrest those responsible for sedition, and has the proclamation posted in the capital. The measures follow established governmental procedure, but their force depends on the king’s signature. The episode shows the distance between issuing an order and securing the political authority needed to enforce it.

On November 16, Benito Mussolini returns to the chamber as prime minister, just fifteen days after the March on Rome. The galleries and corridors are crowded, and deputies largely rise to applaud as he enters with his ministers and General Armando Diaz. The celebratory reception sits alongside the account’s reminder that nineteen people have died and twenty have been seriously injured in Rome during those fifteen days. Parliament’s welcome lends the new government a public legitimacy that the violence surrounding its arrival complicates. The ceremony can make a seizure of political power look like a national occasion, even as the casualties remain part of the same recent history.

Opposition, absence, and the crisis of authority

On May 30, 1924, Alfredo Rocco gives Giacomo Matteotti the floor in a chamber already marked by murmurs of hostility. Matteotti has delivered 106 long, closely argued speeches during four years in office; his persistence has made him an irritating figure to many, including members of his own party. The book places that reputation beside the stakes of his parliamentary work: he is a solitary opponent speaking in an institution where the climate around dissent has grown increasingly threatening.

After Matteotti’s disappearance, opposition deputies withdraw from the chamber in protest. When Mussolini addresses Parliament again on June 13, 370 fascist deputies are present, but the empty places left by the opposition and the presence of Velia Matteotti in the gallery shape the scene. Mussolini promises punishment and condemns the crime, while also presenting it as an injury to fascism itself. He then adjourns the summer session early, leaving its reopening date undecided. The chamber’s formal proceedings continue, but the absence of its opponents and the suspension of its work make that continuity appear profoundly compromised.

Parliament’s later actions show that this crisis does not immediately end all resistance. When the chamber reconvenes after a lengthy recess in November, the commemoration of deputies who have died includes Matteotti’s name. Communist deputy Luigi Repossi objects to fascists participating in the mourning, accusing them of being murderers and accomplices; no fascist deputy silences him. Giovanni Giolitti subsequently votes against a government bill and challenges measures restricting press freedom, and Vittorio Emanuele Orlando joins the opposition. These acts expose cracks in the government’s support, but do not by themselves restore the conditions for open political competition.

On January 3, 1925, the chamber is again full toward the center and right, while the few persistently empty benches on the left define the scene. Most opposition deputies are present but concealed among the galleries. Below, fascist deputies joke, call out, and sing, and no one speaks. The contrast with the chamber’s earlier use as a site of socialist protest and parliamentary denunciation completes the institution’s arc in the account: the hall and its rituals survive, but speech and visible opposition have been displaced by absence, spectacle, and intimidation.