This is not a history.footnote¹ It is simply what my memory supplies when I see the dubious looks of those around me: why were you a Communist? Why do you say that you still are? What do you mean? Is it an illusion that you are clinging to, through stubbornness, through ossification? Every so often someone will stop me and say ‘You were my heroine!’ But what does that mean? The cycle of Communism and the Communists in the 20th century finished so badly that it is impossible not to ask these questions. What did it mean to become a Communist in 1943? A Party member, not just a philosophical adherent whose position could be justified with an ‘I had nothing to do with that’. I started asking them of myself and searching for the answers—without looking at books or documents; but not without doubts.

At the time it did not feel like a rupture. Our family was in the Dolomites, my sister Mimma and I—she was twelve, I was fifteen—looked out for the first autumn colours in the meadows that would signal it was time to leave for Milan. The days went by as normal, while Poland was divided up between the Germans and the Russians; but Poland was far away, the Soviet Union even farther. There had always been a rumble of military news on the radio. The Spanish Civil War had brought us noisy propaganda about nuns and priests with their throats cut, planes taking off from Italy, bloodthirsty Communists, the siege of Alcázar, Teruel, Guadalajara, Madrid. Our family adopted its standard approach: silence and deafness. It was not a question of fear; nobody close to us had been beaten up by the Fascists, and the violence of the Mussolini regime had abated by the 1930s. Ours was a non-fascism, not an anti-fascism; a slightly scornful attempt to stay aloof.

Even when the war began to materialize into tangible things—diversions, shortages, rules—it still seemed to have the character of a natural disaster rather than a human one. I was at the Liceo Manzoni in Milan. I plunged into the works of philosophy my father brought home for me—Eucken, Windelband—lying face-down on the carpet. I was determined to go to University a year early, starting in the autumn of 1941. I had never felt so good in my skin as when I entered that beautiful courtyard in the Corso di Porta Romana. I read History of Art with Matteo Marangoni, Philosophy and Aesthetics with Antonio Banfi. These two teachers remade me: Marangoni taught me how to look at a painting or a statue, indicating with the long shadow of his pointer on the black-and-white slide projection: ‘Look here, and here: how right it is.’ Right—giusto—indicated something absolute. His work on Baroque Art has remained one of the great books; it spoke of a time of upheaval, of violence and its rationalization; confusedly, we felt the need to think about such times, that, as Marangoni let us know. Banfi opened the world of the Warburg Library’s thinkers to us: Panofsky, Wölfflin, Cassirer. His approach was the opposite of determinist; he showed us the confusion of the past, the contradictory clashes and collisions that yielded a history that had neither ends nor end, woven between reality and possibility.

Nobody talked about a ‘lightning war’ any more. Victory proclamations for the Pact of Steel barely masked the increasing indications of disaster. At first the Allied bombing seemed almost unreal. After the sirens had sounded my mother and I stood by the window watching the aeroplanes approaching through the sky. Right above us, one unleashed its bombs. They fell slowly towards us, then gathered speed, exploding just a few hundred yards away. We were thrown back as the window-panes blew in.

A few days later we were huddled in the bomb shelter when the impact of the explosions blew its door off. Dust cascaded onto our heads. We emerged to find our house destroyed. We salvaged what we could and set off, by tram, by cart, to find a place to stay. Eventually we found two rooms and a kitchen at Olmeda, a hill village on the Como–Cantù line, some 30 miles from Milan. The area was full of refugees. My mother worked for the office of an engineering firm that had been evacuated to Cantù; hers was the only regular income since my father had lost his business in Venice ten years before. I would take the tram back there from Milan in the evening, or stay at a friend’s flat overnight.

One defeat followed another through the summer of 1943. The Allies had invaded Sicily but there was no ‘defence of the fatherland’. Then, overnight, the regime collapsed. On July 25th Mussolini was under arrest, replaced by old Marshal Badoglio. Monarchists and Fascists fell to blaming each other; all of them—the King, the ministers, the Fascist leaders—were revealed as petty swindlers, the eagles and the laurel leaves as papier-mâché. I was stunned by the sudden dissolution of what had seemed such a powerful state machine. What did the Badoglio government mean? I pounced on the newspaper reports, dissatisfied and suspicious. The whole country seemed to be lying low, scared, wanting to get rid of the Germans, who were there and not there that summer. The first dissenting voices I heard were those of Giustizia e Libertà. The information they had was uncertain: papers, programmes, rumours. They were another sort of people, they seemed to take the measure of things according to a different set of dimensions.

Badoglio had surrendered to the Allies. For less than a day we believed, with a kind of sad exultation, that it was the end of the war. It was the reverse: the King fleeing to the arms of the Allies in the South, the onset of German occupation in the North. Italy was broken in two like a loaf of bread. The long overcoats of the Germans were everywhere, their harsh orders posted on the walls. The atmosphere at the University was fraught with tension: it was time to choose—to side with the partisans, or to fight against the Allies under German command. The Italian Army had no credibility at all. We were all on our guard, careful who we spoke to, watching who was who.