Word: matteotti
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...quickly got on Mussolini's black list-he dared to condemn the Fascist murder of Socialist Giacomo Matteotti and to ask the King to dismiss // Duce...
When Mussolini seized power in 1922, Orlando supported him, but broke with Il Duce over the Matteotti murder in 1924. After that he abandoned politics, until in 1935 Mussolini's march into Ethiopia stirred Orlando's nationalism. He reappeared briefly in the political spotlight when he wrote Mussolini a fan letter. Otherwise, as he explained grandly: "The profound oblivion . . . descended on my name [is] the rational necessity of a historical situation imposed by destiny." In 1943, in his eighties, he presented himself to war-battered Sicily as a "heroic symbol" of Italian patriotism...
...Rome, too, there was a battle. Into the lassitude of falling autumn leaves burst the garish colors of election posters, the shrill sounds of political hoodlumism. One night, when right-wing Socialist Matteo Matteotti tried to speak in a shabby Rome suburb, Communists attacked him and knocked him to the ground (he is the son of Giacomo Matteotti, the Socialist martyr killed by Mussolini's thugs in 1924, whom the Communists still treat as an idol). Another evening, Communists cornered a group of young Christian Democrats. One Catholic youth of 22 was kicked, beaten and knifed to death...
...stopped a bullet with his head in World War II and lived, recovering miraculously after he had been abandoned as dead in a cave near Bengasi. Yet his most famous dealings with death occurred in the infamous days between the two wars, when he organized the murder of Giacomo Matteotti, the brilliant Socialist deputy who tried to stand up against the Duce...
Later, Saragat's and Matteotti's rebels joined forces in an "Anti-Congress," held in the magnificent, 17th Century Palazzo Barberini (former residence of U.S. Ambassador Alexander C. Kirk). The most important catch of the Nenni Socialists was Novelist Ignazio Silone (Bread and Wine), who has long opposed fusion with the Communists, but apparently could not bring him,self to split with his old party. Saragat succinctly summed up his own reasons for splitting: "I would infinitely prefer to side with our Socialist Comrade Attlee than with Comrade Tito." Said Nenni: "What has happened is an episode...