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In times of constancy he supported the thesis of negotiation. She was a student of the economist Antonio Banfi, “my teacher”, as she defined him. A friend of Jean Paul Sartre, she had lived for a long time in Paris, from where she had returned two years ago, settling in Rome, in a house in the Parioli neighborhood. One of her last public outings was last year, in May, to support some left-wing candidates in the European elections in the House of Women. “In the balance of your life do reasons or grievances prevail more?” We asked her in the last great interview about her life, granted to. Republic, on October 31, 2018. “I tried to make the reasons prevail, but I have had great grievances, after all who can deny that they have not had any.” And what is the biggest mistake: “I don’t tell him. I don’t tell myself.”
“Why were you a communist? Why do you say you are? What do you mean? No party, no charges, next to a newspaper that is no longer yours? Is it an illusion that you cling to, stubbornness, ossification?” firmly and gently: “You were a myth!” But who wants to be a myth? I do not. Myths are the projection of another person, I have nothing to do with that. I’m ashamed. I am not honorably nailed to a tombstone, out of this world and out of time. I am fighting with both … “. In this long quote from Rossana Rossanda’s autobiography” The Girl of the Last Century “(published by Einaudi in 2005), there is all of her, a lady of Italian politics, a never repentant communist but always critical, an eminent Marxist “, as he was proudly presented in the town squares before the rallies. She is small, tough and reluctant to the microphone, cultured, passionate about philosophy and art (she longed for her university career), she who saw her mother at the loom and immediately returned to Vermeer’s lacemaker, was born in 1924 in Pula, in the convulsed eastern frontier, accustomed, bourgeois, to contain feelings (“The reproaches they make me for having given too much or too little to the party, the revolution, the cause of women, the movement or myself, are not unfounded “.
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“It is our fault if Salvini wins, the left has disappointed hopes”
A complex, intelligent, even voluminous woman, who has crossed the century with extraordinary fullness, appointed by Palmiro Togliatti responsible for the cultural policy of the PCI, elected to the Chamber of Deputies in 1963, expelled for the position of “fractionation” by the Committee Central del Se left in 1969, together with Aldo Natoli, Luciana Castellina, Lucio Magri, Luigi Pintor, went through the experience of Pdup, Party of Proletarian Unity for Communism, but above all founder with Pintor, Magri and Valentino Parlato, of “il manifesto”, a newspaper, a group, from which it parted with great bitterness in 2012: “I recognize the unavailability of the management and editorial staff to dialogue. I stop collaborating.” Divergences of political line and editorial approach, perhaps a remediable misunderstanding, the age gap admitted in an interview with Simonetta Fiori: “I have always been seen as a castrating mother even though I have never felt like one. But perhaps it is a generational law” . . To grow up, children need to kill their fathers and mothers. Now is my turn “.
Lucid, secular, politically rational. Del Pci from the 50s and 60s recalls, in his autobiography, the extraordinary contribution “to the process of democratization of Italian society”. After Ingrao’s death in 2015, Rossanda still evokes with great conviction the merits of “that militant, internationalist community”, which was the party, not a ship of madmen, but a multiplier of forces with a great horizon that gave meaning to the stories. of individuals … The pride of having been in an important history, which however does not prevent him from immediately focusing on the errors, the increasingly excruciating doubts about the USSR, the deep malaise over the events in Hungary in 1956 (“ The Hungarian story gathered inside me in a photograph, an official hanging from a light in front of the Csepel, with his neck broken and his face disheveled by the hanged man, while two factory workers in rebellion laugh below him … Communists who become hated are always wrong “).
Rossanda’s analyzes: without veils, without omissions, without hypocrisy. Thus in that famous article in the 1978 “manifesto”, in the midst of Moro’s kidnapping, who tried to understand the logic of the Red Brigades: “Anyone who was a communist in the 1950s suddenly recognizes the new language of the BRs. He seems to be leafing through the family album: there are all the ingredients that were served in Stalin and Zhdanov’s happy memory courses. ” Fierce controversy ensued, Emanuele Macaluso, from the Unity columns, spoke of “impressive confusion and distortion”. But Rossanda, petite, white-haired, with the unmistakable mole above her mouth, an indifferent smile, did not flinch. Solid girl, girl of the last century, physically fragile in old age.
He had long chosen to live in Paris, recording every impact of Italian political life. Because in Paris lived and died, in 2014, his life partner, Karol Kewes Karol, a Polish Jewess, who escaped Nazism by taking refuge in Russia where he enlisted in the Red Army, one of the founders of the Nouvel Observateur, a collaborator of the manifesto since the beginning. number. Karol was blind, Rossanda assisted him with kindness and affection, until the end. But this is his private life, jealously kept out of the spotlight. She also spoke reluctantly about Lucio Magri’s assisted suicide in 2011. She accompanied her to Switzerland to die, other friends refused. A heartbreaking decision, she told Antonio Gnoli: “Lucio was terribly unhappy. She was facing a political failure and thought she had everything wrong. I do not regret that gesture. I think it was one of the most difficult decisions, but also deeply human
Magri’s political failure was also Rossanda’s, which she felt. But despite being trapped in a wheelchair after a stroke, despite being disappointed by the vulgarity of current politics, Rossanda, a student of the philosopher Antonio Banfi and the art historian Matteo Marangoni, held the strongest antibody. against depression to the end: as a trained esthete he perceived beauty: “What saved me was my great curiosity about the world and about culture.” Beauty, indeed. That beauty that I had met as a child, in Istria, “walking through desert islands full of wild rabbits, among daffodils as tall as me that smelled strongly. Until the end, I regret repressed by reason, by the consciousness of “a body that does not respond”: “I would be sorry to die for the books that I have not read and the places that I have not visited but I confess that I no longer have any attachment to life”.
