Polesine is the rural landscape at the heart of the book’s account of Fascist violence and peasant resistance. In its villages, farmsteads, and small labor offices, political conflict becomes part of ordinary life: disputes over agricultural work and land are enforced by armed squads, while the people who bear the consequences are named and remembered. The region is also the home of Giacomo Matteotti, whose defense of its impoverished peasants and whose eventual burial there give Polesine a lasting place in the narrative.

Rural Setting and Social Divisions

The book presents Polesine as a valley of scattered settlements and agricultural workplaces, where a league leader’s home or a modest employment bureau could become the focus of an organized raid. The rural distances matter to the episodes: squads arrive at night in trucks, often accompanied by representatives of the local Agrarian Association, whose knowledge of the area helps them locate their targets. Political power in this setting is not abstract. It reaches into homes and village institutions, and it is backed by a local alliance between landowners and armed activists.

The countryside is also marked by stark differences in wealth and allegiance. The peasants whom Matteotti represents are among the poorest in Italy; his own father is a wealthy landowner, suspected of lending money at excessive interest. Matteotti’s decision to champion peasants whose poverty was tied to his father’s position makes his regional identity politically charged. He is revered by the people of Polesine and disliked by members of his own class, a division condensed in the mocking nickname they give him, “the socialist in furs.”

Raids and Political Violence

By the end of February 1921, the book places an armed squad at a farmhouse in the Polesine countryside. The men search for a peasant-league leader, who initially escapes into the fields before returning when he hears that his family is in danger. The squad brings his elderly parents, wife, and children outside and stages a threatened execution. The incident ends without his death, but its purpose is intimidation: the family is forced to confront the threat, and the ordeal becomes an example of the pressure exerted on rural organizers.

The episode belongs to a wider pattern that Matteotti describes in Parliament. He recounts nighttime raids across villages and hamlets, in which league leaders are sought out, threatened, seized, or attacked. His account names Salara, Pettorazza, Pincara, Adria, Loreo, Ariano, and Lendinara. At Salara, a night worker is killed after answering a knock at his door; elsewhere, organizers are taken from their homes or workplaces. By naming places and individual circumstances, Matteotti turns what might be dismissed as a general account of unrest into a record of violence distributed across the region.

His description also identifies the political machinery behind the raids. The squads’ arrival with Agrarian Association leaders points to cooperation between local land interests and the men carrying out the attacks. The effect is to make the countryside itself feel politically exposed: a knock at night or the appearance of a truck can signal that a household or labor organization has been marked. In the Chamber, the specificity of the places and incidents briefly produces an unusual silence, linking parliamentary debate to the experience of rural communities.

Matteotti and the Region

Matteotti’s relationship to Polesine is more than a matter of origin. Elected to Parliament in December 1919, he speaks for peasants whose poverty and political vulnerability he has made central to his public life. In his parliamentary denunciation, he traces the violence to the conflict over renewal of the agricultural concordat and challenges the government’s assurances that it is suppressing Fascist raids. His method is to name villages and recount events rather than leave the violence at the level of political accusation.

On March 12, 1921, Matteotti travels to Castelguglielmo, in the province of Rovigo, for a political meeting, accompanied by the mayor of Pincara. Fascists gathered from around the province, including men from nearby Ferrara, seize him and demand that he sign declarations renouncing his position. He refuses. They burn the peasant league’s headquarters, drive him around the countryside, and later abandon him near Lendinara. The episode brings his parliamentary account of rural intimidation into his own life: the representative who has described the danger faced by local organizers becomes a target of that same political campaign.

Burial and Lasting Significance

On August 21, 1924, Matteotti’s remains are returned to Polesine for burial in Fratta Polesine, his region of origin. His wife, Velia, chooses the local funeral rather than a political burial in Rome. At Monterotondo station, peasants, laborers, and railway workers gather along the tracks; in Fratta, tens of thousands of workers await the coffin. The funeral makes the region a place of public mourning, but also of demands for justice and retribution.

The ceremony’s focus shifts from the young widow to Matteotti’s elderly mother, who has already lost her other six children. Her grief connects the political murder to a family history of repeated loss, while the assembled workers connect it to a collective history of struggle. Polesine thus closes a circle opened by Matteotti’s advocacy: the rural population he defended becomes the crowd that receives him home. In the book, the region is at once the ground of peasant hardship, the terrain of Fascist intimidation, and the place where the consequences of that violence are publicly confronted.