August 16th, 1924, a century ago, was a Saturday. Between the 15th of August, a national holiday, and a Sunday, nothing happens in Italy. Unless you want to make it happen between August 15th and a Sunday, to make it go as unnoticed as possible.

The clique of assassins who governed Italy at the time, led by the gang leader Mussolini, had decided that it was the right time to make the corpse of its most excellent victim reappear.

Giacomo Matteotti had in fact been murdered in Rome on 10 June 1924, just two months earlier. The political crisis that had arisen was waning, albeit very slowly, Mussolini felt calmer even if he remained on alert. Of course, the opposition, which had abandoned Parliament at the end of June, continued to forcefully ask for clarity on the crime. But it was August and the Italians, since the Emperor August holidays, Feriae Augusti, which later became Ferragosto, were all on holiday. Therefore the attention of what could be called “public opinion” at the time, was at its lowest. But if this explains the choice of the moment, it does not explain the choice itself. Why make Matteotti’s body reappear?

In some ways it was a way to reduce the mystery by attenuating the collective attention that always surrounds unsolved cases. The Matteotti case was a case in point as it had captured the attention of Italy and the world and this was a problem (especially for Mussolini) as it was the large number of hypotheses and research of the body on the part of the investigating judiciary which in turn generated great attention from the press.

It was precisely the journalistic campaign of the opposition newspapers on the Matteotti case that pushed Mussolini to implement, on 8 July, a month earlier, a 1923 provision which expanded censorship of the press, which was the prelude to the series of forced closures of opposition newspapers in 1925. But by August 1924, with the opposition on a war footing, the press’s frantic attention on the case was a serious problem for Mussolini’s government.

Making the corpse reappear also had a practical function. The investigation by the judge’s magistrate proceeded at a rapid pace, the interrogations of the murderers, almost all arrested in the two weeks following the crime, increased the pressure to reveal where they had buried Matteotti and the reconstruction of responsibilities quickly rose from the squad members up to the top of the regime. They needed something new that would distract the magistrates’ work for a while.

Making the body reappear was also a way to show that the police were doing something, that the state was not inert, after Mussolini had even been forced to fire the chief of police, the former quadrumvir De Bono, immediately after the crime. But to make the discovery of the body by the police credible, it was necessary to make it appear to be the result of a combination of chance and commitment from the institutions.

So it was that on August 12th Matteotti’s bloody jacket was found, or better, it was made sure to be found, in a drain, like many on the Via Flaminia, around kilometer 18, just outside Rome. Domenico Pallavicini, a captain of the Carabinieri who was later proven to be a fascist and, as the historian Mauro Canali discovered, even a member of the political police (the infamous OVRA, code number 167, in 1927) carefully manages the discovery, communicating it only the day after to the judges who were investigating the case. The newspapers didn’t talk about it until August 15th when they reported news of the discovery and the intense searches by the police, especially the fascist ones. Therefore, from an apparently fortuitous circumstance, a vaunted commitment by the state was shown.

On the morning of the 16th phase two was triggered with the discovery of the remains of Matteotti in the Quartarella woods. They were found a sergeant on leave, Ovidio Caratelli, son of the guardian of the woodland estate, at km 22 of the Flaminia, a little further north of the drain where the jacket was found. The brigadier justifies his discovery thanks to the discovery of the jacket, which had prompted Captain Pallavicini to suggest to carry out research in the area. He also said that it was his dog that attracted him to the place where Matteotti was buried.

The only remains of Matteotti was his skeleton. They recognized him by his gold tooth. They had stripped him completely before abandoning him in a grave not even a meter long, poorly covered and too small to contain a 1.70 meter man. For this they had torn him to pieces, stripped him naked, bent in a natural way, and even deprived him of his wedding ring. A file was left by the assassins stuck between his ribs. The extreme outrage for the deputy who had dared to challenge the Duce.

Velia Matteotti will arrive in the evening, breaking all security cordons and kneeling in front of the coffin. She will ask that he could be buried in his hometown, in Fratta Polesine, and that no fascist soldier, of any rank or position or black shirt, should be allowed to escort the train. She wanted to travel with the body during the day, the government will impose the transfer at night. Velia will be forced to abandon her mourning clothes, and even forbidden to use her husband’s name for their own children, just as it was forbidden to place flowers on the grave, just as a public funeral was forbidden. There wasn’t even a speech. Velia herself was kept under strict control for years, to the point that Sylvia Pankhurst felt important to organize the Womens’ International Matteotti Committee, in 1932, to ask for her “liberation”.

In the following weeks, the magistrate Mauro Del Giudice who was investigating the case was unable to convince himself of the circumstances in which the discovery occurred and questioned Ovidio Caratelli, his father and also his brother Dante several times, also wasting a lot of time, which was probably one of the objectives of Mussolini. In addition to a witness who questioned the presence of Caratelli’s dog, rumors circulated that Dante had met the gang of assassins on the night of the murder. And these rumors were supported by a testimony from Dumini, the ringleader of the assassins, in his interrogation on October 24th. At the 1947 trial, however, it was discovered that that forest was known to the circle of squad members of Mussolini’s political police. Therefore the Caratelli family probably knew since June that Matteotti’s body was hidden in that wood and Matteotti’s killers had known the woodland estate that the Caratellis controlled since before the murder.

And the jacket? It certainly hadn’t remained in the drain for two months, and in fact it hadn’t been seen by any of the roadmen of the Rome North Railway who worked on the Flaminia between June and August. Furthermore, in addition to not showing signs of wear, it would not have made sense for the murderers to get rid of it near the body, nor for them to get rid of just the jacket, having instead kept the bloody trousers which were seized in Dumini at the time of the arrest. The jacket was instead probably saved by police chief De Bono after Dumini’s arrest and subsequently used to start the fake discovery.

For all these reasons there really isn’t really much doubt that the discovery of Matteotti’s body was planned by the regime. An ignoble scene and an ignoble show which, a century later, are still striking for their cynicism and hypocrisy and are an emblematic scene of the gruesome violence that was the hallmark of fascism from its origins.

Photo of the hole where the poor remains of Matteotti were found in the Macchia della Quartarella taken from the scientific police report of 16 August 1924