An Italian in Margareten

Giacomo Matteotti was an Italian socialist who stood up in the parliament in Rome and denounced Mussolini's election fraud. A few weeks later he was kidnapped and murdered. This was 1924.

 

Three years on, Vienna's city council decided to name this new apartment block after him, at a moment when Mussolini was firmly in the saddle and the Austrian government was going out of its way to stay on good terms with Rome. So naming a residential block after his most famous victim wasn't really a domestic gesture. It was foreign policy written in brick.

 

After 1934 this name came down too, and after the war it returned, together with a bronze portrait of Matteotti by the passageway.

 

Step into the courtyard and you can see where the money went, because the complex had its own kindergarten, a laundry and shop units along the ground floor, so that daily household life no longer had to fit into a single room.

 

We carry on north, into the street named after the residents themselves.