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By Root 1549 0

’s name made me immediately accepted among the Party’s intellectuals. In those days a foreign communist was automatically a member of the brotherhood, a ‘compagno’ addressed as ‘tu’ and not ‘lei’. Indeed the first name on Sraffa’s list I telephoned in Rome, the most senior communist historian at the time, Delio Cantimori, a slow-moving, stout expert on the heretics of the sixteenth century, who had a wicked wit and looked older than his age, immediately invited me to stay with him and his Marx-translating wife, Emma, in their apartment in Trastevere. From there, with his help, I made contact with the Rome-based anti-fascist intellectuals, at that time overwhelmingly communist or Party-sympathizing. One way or another, most of what I learned about Italy – landscape and art history apart – came to me via Italian communists or those Italians still close to them in the early 1950s. It was my luck that my friends among Italian left-wing intellectuals, and especially historians, combining practice with theory, often doubled as observant and analytical journalists.

However, almost anyone who travelled in the remoter rural parts of Italy in the 1950s found people ready to ask and answer questions from foreigners. This was, after all, still a country of oral communication, face to face. In places like Spezzano Albanese (Cosenza, Calabria) such few papers as reached the place still had to be read aloud to the illiterates in cafés, artisan workshops and the PCI ‘Sezione’. In 1955 the telephone had reached San Giovanni in Fiore, the home of the great medieval millennial theorist, Abbot Joachim of Flora, only a few months ago. Strangers, Italian or foreign, brought news – even to people who whether they liked it or not knew that new times were inevitably coming. ‘Things are changing,’ I was told more than once in 1955 Sicily. ‘Our customs are getting like those of the North, for instance women going out. In the end I expect we’ll be like the Northerners.’

At that time the PCI seemed the main gateway into these new times. It had a membership of about two million – about one quarter of the national electorate – which continued to rise with every election until at its peak in the later 1970s it more or less equalled – enthusiasts claimed it was about to pass – the 34 per cent of the party of permanent government, the Christian Democrats. Socially the PCI was a cross-section of Italian society as much as a class party, especially in its massive strongholds in north–central Italy: Emilia-Romagna, Tuscany, Umbria – regions of culture, prosperity, technological and business dynamism, and honest administration. Italian communism was not the whole of Italy, but a central and a wonderfully civilizing element of it. But, like nonconformity in Britain, it was and remained a minority.

Nevertheless, it was a huge and deeply rooted movement. The popolo comunista (communist people), as the cadres called it, was more than merely a collection of crosses on ballot-papers or annually renewed membership cards. Its major regular manifestation, nominally a way of organizing financial support for the Party’s daily newspaper, L’Unità (which the vast majority of communists read no more than most Italians read any daily paper), was a pyramid of regular popular festivals with its base in every village or city district, which culminated in the annual Festa Nazionale de l’Unità in some major centre. My connection with Italian politics began when I was described as a ‘fraternal delegate’ and had to address such an occasion, God knows how, in 1953 in a village near the Po. The Festa was essentially a collective national family holiday excursion to spend money for the cause and to have a collective good time with wives, children, friends and trusted leaders. It is said that, on the first occasion it was held in Naples, the population of that great city, conscious that the influx of visitors was not tourists to be fleeced, but plain folks and compagni, listened to the appeal of its leaders and for twenty-four hours abstained from its proverbial activities. The Festa