Remembering Berlinguer: Mourning, Nostalgia and the Left

This chapter considers the legacy of Italian Communist Party leader Enrico Berlinguer and examines the way in which his memory has been constructed in the 40 years since his sudden death in 1984. Berlinguer became a political celebrity in Italy and around the world in the 1970s. As the leader of the West’s largest Communist Party and a champion of ‘Eurocommunism’, he symbolised widespread hopes for radical change within a parliamentary democracy. Although those days were in the past when he died, Berlinguer was given the most extraordinary mass funeral to take place in the history of the Italian Republic. Taking Paul Ginsborg’s writings and interventions on Berlinguer as a starting point, the chapter looks at the way processes of mourning and nostalgia shaped perceptions of the man and led to both backward-looking and forward-looking interpretations of his legacy in a political environment in which the PCI and the post-war party system no longer existed.