Some of the students have either researched or remembered those days of ’68-’69. I’d like to fill in a few of the developments that were left out, plus clarify some references that Lenu’ makes in the third volume.
When Italy tried to make a separate peace with the Allies in September 1943, Germany still occupied much of the Italian peninsula. They maintained Mussolini and his fascist party in power in much of the country (while U.S. and British troops moved north from Sicily). One reason the Italian Communist Party (Partito Communista Italiano — PCI) was so popular and strong in the post-war period is that the Communists were the main organizers of a partisan guerrilla war against the German occupation and the fascists. They were especially strong in the northern part of the country and organized an uprising on April 25, 1945, that liberated those parts from the German occupation before the U.S. troops arrived. There was even an uprising in Naples, which I’ll discuss later.
Not only did the Communist vote grow from about 20% to 35% nationally by the mid-1970s, but the party governed cities; for example, Bologna had almost uninterrupted governance by the party. And the Communist Party was very strong in the working class in the industrial centers of Genoa, Turin and Milan; they led the main unions. Right after the war, because the fascists were completely discredited for destroying Italy, while the smaller capitalist parties were compromised with fascism, it appeared possible that the Communists would take power. The U.S. State Department got these small capitalist parties to unite and along with the Vatican created the Christian Democrats, and the U.S. did everything it could to decide the 1948 election. The Christian Democrats led the national government from about 1948 to 1960 or so and then in alliance with the Socialist Party and others until the 1990s. But I don’t want to get ahead on this.
By the time of the 68-69 massive workers’ strikes and student protests, the more radical students and workers considered the Communist Party of Italy (PCI) to be quite conservative and tied to the existing political structure. (The U.S. and the Italian capitalists and military on the other hand never wanted to allow the PCI into the national government and had secret organizations determined to stop this from happening.) In the novel we see Pasquale, a worker who starts as a PCI member, grow furious at the party leadership, calling them bureaucrats. He is also angry that they didn’t support his father when he was charged with murdering Don Achille, and says his father “had taken part in the Four Days of Naples,” (p116) which was the uprising against the fascists and the German occupation in Naples (an aside, there is a movie of that name about the uprising, which I saw at least twice in the 1960s). Lenu’ also grows disillusioned with the PCI, and at one time she says that she stopped reading l’Unita‘, the PCI newspaper, and started reading Lotta Continua and Il Manifesto. (p249)
The movement was so big that these other newspapers were produced by other political organizations, Lotta Continua and some Lenu’ doesn’t mention like Democrazia Proletaria, Avanguardia Operai that were considered more revolutionary that the PCI. They themselves had thousands of members and tens of thousands of sympathizers although they were small compared to the PCI itself.
Lenu’ also mentions some of the bombings, in particular that of a bank in Milan, which I had forgotten. I remember a bombing of the Bologna train station that killed a lot of people and also one of a train traveling near Brescia in the north of the country. While there was an attempt to blame those bombings on small communist groups that were made up of people even more frustrated than Pasquale, but were unable to, it was too unreasonable. It turned out that there was a right-wing militarist conspiracy that carried out such actions precisely to prevent the PCI from entering the government.
Lila, by the way, is a fantastic organizer on the shop floor, at least how Lenu described it. Well, I’ve written enough so I’ll stop here.
