For nearly a decade Italian Socialists have been living with the bitter aftermath of the day in January 1947 when a lean, jut-jawed young intellectual bearing an honored name rose to address a party congress in the Great Hall of Rome University. The speaker was Matteo Matteotti. His father was Socialist Leader Giacomo Matteotti, modern Italy's No. 1 political martyr.*
Young Matteo Matteotti, bone-bred Socialist that he was, was nonetheless outraged by the alliance which Socialist Party Leader Pietro Nenni had just made with the Communists. Sadly, Matteotti charged Nenni with spreading "fear and terrorism" in the party. Then, amidst cries of "degenerate son," he stalked out to help organize a splinter group, which eventually became the anti-Communist Social Democratic Party.
In the years that followed, Nenni and Matteotti brushed past each other in the halls of the Italian Parliament without speaking. Last week, in the same Rome University building in which the 1947 split occurred, wily, aging (65) Pietro Nenni and 35-year-old Matteo Matteotti, now secretary of the Social Democratic Party, were once again in conversation.
Nenni's Communist-linked Socialist Party had won a sizable vote in last month's Italian municipal elections. Its support could help the ruling Christian Democratic coalition to form governments in the more than 100 large Italian cities where no single party now has a clear-cut majority. The Christian Democrats were still spurning Nenni's aid, but Nenni thought that the Social Democrats (now one of three junior partners in the Christian Democratic coalition) might be willing to accept his tainted help. He addressed a letter to "Caro Matteo."
Many Social Democrats, including Vice Premier Giuseppe Saragat, the party's leader, were far from happy to see Matteotti negotiating with Stalin Peace Prize winner Nenni. And right from the start, Nenni flatly refused to meet the most critical Social Democratic condition for collaboration—a demand that he break his "unity of action" pact with the Communists. Matteotti, carefully leaving the door open to further negotiations, said that the first round of talks produced "no ruptures and no miracles." At week's end, however, Saragat stepped in to make it clear that neither he nor the Social Democratic Party directorate would accept anything less than a miracle. Said Saragat: "We are ready for unification by any means but one: totalitarianism."
* In 1924 Mussolini's bullyboys attacked him one day beside the Tiber, and stabbed him to death with a file.