Fratta Polesine, Giacomo Matteotti’s place of origin, became the setting of his second burial on August 21, 1924. At the wishes of his wife, Velia Matteotti, he was laid to rest there rather than given the political burial Filippo Turati had proposed for Rome. The ceremony brought his body back to its home region and made a local funeral a national scene of mourning and protest.

Setting and Return

The journey to Fratta Polesine began at Monterotondo station, where peasants, laborers, and railway workers knelt along the tracks as the coffin departed. In Fratta, tens of thousands of mourning workers awaited it, demanding vengeance, justice, and retribution. Their presence connected the village to a wider public response to Matteotti’s killing: the procession ended not in private silence but amid a crowd that joined grief to political claims.

The Funeral

In Fratta Polesine, the scene’s central figure was no longer the young widow but Matteotti’s elderly mother, Lucia Elisabetta Garzarolo, commonly called Isabella. A battalion arrayed along the provincial road presented arms, and a priest gave the ritual blessing. As Isabella was accompanied to the coffin, she began sobbing and ended in grief-stricken shrieks. She was burying her last surviving child: all seven of her children had been taken by tuberculosis, by life, and by fascism. The ceremony’s formal military and religious gestures thus stood beside an intimate family devastation that had accumulated across a lifetime.

Public Meaning and Aftermath

The funeral placed Fratta Polesine at the center of the book’s account of a country in mourning, siding with a mother’s sorrow. That sympathy did not settle the political crisis. In the days that followed, fascism was again reviled internationally and plunged back into squad violence; the passage notes deaths and injuries in the streets of Naples. On August 31, Benito Mussolini addressed Mount Amiata coal miners and threatened opponents with violence, while dismissing the Aventine secessionists’ abstention. Against that escalation, Fratta’s funeral remains a scene in which grief, public demands for justice, and the political struggle over Matteotti’s death converge.