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He was 96 years old. She had been “a girl” in the thirties and forties of the last century. Rossana Rossanda, an Italian communist of great race, a special race of the 20th century sadly in danger of extinction, died. Emanuele Macaluso and Giorgio Napolitano and some more remain. The news of her death caused a pang in my heart, as if I had seen her again yesterday and even if it was in her wheelchair.
Instead, 49 years have passed since those first days of May 1971 when, in the Roman office of the newspaper “il Manifesto” in via Tomacelli, I took my bag and left after sending my letter of resignation to the editor. Luigi Painter. Those who had founded it three months before were all Italian Communists of a great breed, from Luigi Pintor to Aldo Natoli alla Rossanda, from Valentino Parlato to Massimo Caprara, a little less Lucio Magri who showed all the symptoms of the Cattocommunist. I was not a communist at all, and therefore I was very uncomfortable in a newspaper that wanted to be the outpost of a future Communist Party further to the left of the PCI.
Since my resignation I have not seen or met Rossana again. Some twenty years later, my director of “Panorama” insisted on death for me to interview. Of course he refused to do so, I suppose he did not mind having to deal with a “renegade” like me, one who considers hard as steel that two were the great tragedies of the 20th century: the victory of the Bolshevik Communist Party in St. Petersburg. and the victory of the Nazis in Berlin, and not to say that the second had part of its origins in the first. Certainly the victory of Italian fascism had it, which had defeated in the field a socialist party that had previously suffered the split of the future cloud-catching communists and that at the time of the March on Rome was working to expel the “reformists” like Turati.
Of course, since I no longer set foot in via Tomacelli, my affection and respect for Painter, Natoli (also one who had strayed from the political and moral latitude of the party), Rossanda, had never faded away from a comma, Spoken, that exactly as before I considered him a close friend, a friend forever. And since at a time when he was the editor of the “Manifesto”, his newspaper had addressed me in offensive terms, I sent a personal note to Valentino telling him that never, ever, in a newspaper run by me, someone could have written such lines. offensive towards him. I met him for the last time on a bus, I was coming home from the current writing of the “Manifesto”, not far from my house. Obviously, I turned to him fondly, and I saw a little fondness in his eyes.
It is very easy for a non-communist to have these ambivalent feelings, or rather to distinguish between feelings and ideologies, between people and their political affiliations. It was not for the Italian Communists, although of great breed. They had settled ab initio in one part and they were, in all respects, with every particle of his body and his feeling. Rossana went on to define herself as “communist,” a term that means nothing unless Italian communists, French communists, Romanian communists, Cubans, or perhaps East German communists, are in the same group. a monstrosity of reason. Not only. Not once did the “red” color of politics shine in the world that Rossana did not illuminate and color her face as in an intellectual war.
His infatuation with the Maoist “cultural revolution”, a terrible civil war that caused millions of deaths, remains grave in terms of the history of ideas. And yet none of us has escaped the intellectual pleasure of reading her autobiography, “The Girl of the Last Century.” Just as it is impossible to erase from our memory and from our soul the traces that the Italian communists have left imprinted on it, from Antonio Gramsci to Giorgio Amendola, from Pietro Ingrao to Bruno Trentin. And not to mention Macaluso, one who at 96 explains Italian politics like few others. Indeed, an exceptional breed and more if we compare it with the cheap protagonists of our current policy.
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