Bolesine

Polesine is a low-lying, water-bound province whose poverty and political upheaval give it unusual weight in the book. It is the landscape of Giacomo Matteotti’s childhood and the constituency he chose over his prosperous family’s class: a region where generations of rural deprivation met new peasant organization, electoral victories, and escalating political violence. Its history is presented not as scenery behind national events but as a struggle over who belonged to the land, who could speak for its people, and what kind of change might redeem it.

Landscape and Rural Conditions

The narrative describes Polesine as amphibious and malarial, a country of marshland scored by 500 waterways, including rivers, canals, catchments, and ditches. The water shaped the labor and the hazards of daily life. For centuries, many inhabitants had lived in crowded and impoverished conditions, vulnerable to chronic illness and early death. The text links this prolonged deprivation to the broader social order: rural poverty was not a passing emergency but a condition accumulated over generations.

A childhood memory helps make that history concrete without resolving it into a neat anecdote. Matteotti recalls a cow that died of disease and was buried under municipal supervision. As he prepares to speak at a rally, he returns in memory to the boy on the balcony of the family manor, where his father gave him binoculars so he could observe the hardship on which the family’s prosperity rested. Yet the memory has become uncertain: Matteotti is no longer sure whether the animal died of anthrax, or whether the story is even fully his own memory. What remains certain to him is the poverty of the region. The episode makes the distance between the manor and the surrounding rural population part of his personal history.

The landscape was also being altered. Thousands of reclamation works had been carried out during the preceding twenty years, while peasant leagues were established, diseases were treated, and poor people’s rights were asserted. In the book’s account, this work offers a counterpoint to the region’s long-standing deprivation: change is possible, but it is gradual, collective, and unfinished. The same land that signifies hardship can therefore also represent a future made through sustained labor and organization.

Matteotti’s Chosen Home

Matteotti’s family background placed him on the privileged side of the divide. His father, Girolamo, was a large landowner, and his paternal grandfather had been a merchant. Opponents used that ancestry to discredit him, portraying him as an agrarian who had crossed over to the proletariat and a privileged son who posed as a moralist. His father, too, believed that he had abandoned the position assigned to him by birth.

Matteotti’s answer, as the narrative frames it, was a choice about political belonging. He regarded the impoverished peasants as his people, rather than identifying himself with his father and grandfather. His commitment was neither an inherited local identity nor a simple gesture of sympathy: he aligned himself with those whose conditions of life exposed the cost of the existing order. Polesine consequently became, for him, not merely a place of shame or remorse, but a possible place of redemption.

That identification also shaped his political method. Matteotti was not presented as a maximalist who expected revolution to deliver immediate happiness. He believed instead in the arduous, extended liberation of the oppressed through further sacrifice and struggle. In Rome, he was known for moderation and sound judgment; in Polesine, among people whose hardships he understood as structural, he spoke with the force of someone addressing the conditions that had formed his own moral and political outlook. His commitment to reform did not depend on pretending that the local conflict was gentle. It depended on recognizing both the people’s grievances and the danger that hatred could deepen them.

Elections, Organization, and Political Tension

The province became a conspicuous center of socialist strength. In the previous November’s election, Polesine sent Matteotti and five other socialist deputies to Parliament. Alongside Ferrara, it was described as one of Italy’s reddest provinces. The following local elections seemed to extend that advance: voting took place in rounds through October, and the first results showed socialist candidates winning in all 25 municipalities counted so far, with 38 still to report. Fratta Polesine, Matteotti’s birthplace, was among those remaining. The early returns gave him reason to hope that socialists might gain control of the entire province and begin building a different political order.

That electoral promise coexisted with coercion and fear. Churches had been forced to close, people going to Mass were attacked, and armed communist squads patrolled polling places, at times forcing voters to submit pre-completed ballots. Matteotti intervened when his former schoolmate Umberto Merlin, a Catholic deputy, was attacked by farmers at a polling place in Lendinara. The incident complicated any simple division between oppressed workers and their political opponents: revolutionary hopes could become coercive, and Matteotti’s defense of a rival showed that his commitment to the peasants did not mean accepting every act committed in their name.

The larger climate of violence also affected the region’s political interpretation. Merlin accused socialist leaders of cultivating hatred and creating a regime of terror, and the attack in Lendinara appeared to give force to that charge. Elsewhere in Italy, fascist violence supplied its own evidence of the danger facing political opponents; the text describes assassinations and punitive killings in other areas as part of the national atmosphere in which moderates could be both alarmed by fascist brutality and frightened by socialist militancy. These episodes are not presented as events in Polesine itself, but they sharpen the stakes of the province’s local contest: political violence could be invoked by opposing camps to justify further repression or resistance.

A Province in the National Conflict

Polesine’s rural politics were bound to the wider struggle over land, class, and state power. In the aftermath of a massacre elsewhere in the province, a three-day general strike suspended public and private services. The deaths also prompted farmers, manufacturers, merchants, professionals, public employees, and property owners to organize. On April 8, a meeting promoted by the Chamber of Commerce established the Bolognese Association of Social Defense; a delegation later presented Prime Minister Nitti with a brief accusing the state of failing to confront socialist violence and offering to replace its authority in the name of self-defense. The account shows how local violence could drive groups beyond ordinary political organization toward claims that private associations should assume public functions.

Fascist organizing also grew through the entanglement of local forces and material support. In Ferrara, an inspector sent by Benito Mussolini found that new fascist sections had little political or ideological substance and were organized chiefly against socialists. Agrarian interests supported them financially; by December 20 they had contributed 20,000 lire to fascist funds. Although this development concerns neighboring Ferrara rather than Polesine, it illuminates the surrounding regional political economy: opposition to socialism could draw together landowners and fascist organizers, while disputes over who controlled rural labor and land supplied the conflict with local force.

The book returns to Polesine through Aldo Finzi, a wealthy landowner’s son from the same province as Matteotti. Their similar origins make their political divergence especially revealing. Matteotti repudiated his class position and identified himself with the rural poor; Finzi did not. In the parliamentary exchange between them, Finzi argued that socialist agitation had provoked the violence that spread through Polesine. The province thus served as more than a constituency in their dispute: it was the contested evidence each side used to explain who had caused the crisis and who had the right to claim the people.

Polesine’s narrative significance rests in this unresolved tension. Reclamation and peasant organization offer the prospect of change, and socialist victories make that prospect politically visible. Yet poverty persists, elections are compromised by intimidation, and violence gives both socialist and fascist adversaries material for accusation. Through Matteotti’s chosen allegiance and his continued insistence on measured, gradual liberation, the province becomes a test of whether political redemption can answer rural suffering without reproducing the coercion that suffering has helped unleash.