Introduction: Negotiating Memories of Protest

Abstract

In 2004 I set foot for the first time in Bologna, a popular university city in northern Italy, nicknamed the ‘red city’ — and not just because of the characteristic red buildings that make up the medieval city. In the 1970s Bologna was also the showpiece of the Italian Communist Party (Partito Comunista Italiano, or PCI), which was the largest Communist party in Western Europe and had dominated the so-called red belt regions of this part of the country since the late 1960s (Mussi, 1978; Clark, 2008, pp. 467–468). Although the hegemony of the left has long since waned, the memory of the 1970s is still very much alive among both older and younger generations of left-wing activists. This first came to my attention when a friend pointed out to me a curious commemorative site only one block from where I was living at the time: it consisted of a plaque recalling the violent death of a certain Francesco Lorusso. The site was complemented by a glass plate on a wall near by, covering the holes left by the bullet holes made by a police officer who shot Lorusso during student protests in 1977. I had walked past this site many times without ever noticing it. When I attended the next anniversary of the shooting, I was struck by the presence of many young people: after all, they had no direct memory of these events, so what had brought them to pay tribute to Lorusso?