“Berlinguer was a great man and a great politician. All my gratitude goes to him, even though I have always been a man of the right-wing party.”
This was murmured by my father as images of Enrico Berlinguer (1922–1984) ran on TV during the news coverage celebrating the centenary of his birth last February.
What was Berlinguer’s significance 100 years after his birth?
Enrico Berlinguer was secretary of the Italian Communist Party (PCI) from 1972 until his death from a stroke during a rally in Padua. He joined the PCI in 1943 and, like other young people of his generation, became a Communist due to his interest in anti-fascism. When Berlinguer was elected secretary of PCI, Italian society was experiencing change driven by the 1968 student protest and the workers’ “Hot Autumn” strikes. But it was also shaken by the neo-fascist massacre in Piazza Fontana in December 1969. Berlinguer’s PCI wanted to give a political outlet to the country’s demand for renewal and defend republican institutions, strengthening ties with the country’s democratic forces: Berlinguer conceived the “Historic Compromise,” an attempt to reach an agreement with the Christian Democrats to govern the country together with then-president Aldo Moro, who was later brutally murdered by the Red Brigades.
Enrico Berlinguer meets Leuna-Werke workers during a visit to East Germany, 1973. (Images courtesy of Monkeys Video Lab.)
Now, for the first time, his life is being interpreted for the public with a museum exhibition at the Mattatoio in Rome: I luoghi e le parole di Enrico Berlinguer (The Places and Words of Enrico Berlinguer).
Built in the Testaccio district in the last two decades of the nineteenth century, the Mattatoio was once used for slaughtering animals. The exhibition space consists of two large sheds called pavilions, which are opposite each other like two imposing bastions. The pavilions are surrounded by an area that has been flattened. On the outside, the enclosures that once contained the animals waiting to be slaughtered remain. Now restored, the bars have been freed. The exhibition celebrating the career of one of Italy’s most important political figures, who dedicated much of his life to workers’ struggles, could only be displayed in such a space, a place that once belonged to the proletariat, the social class to which the party secretary was closest.
The exhibition is divided into two pavilions, which house galleries 9a and 9b. In the first gallery, visitors are greeted by a large book where it is possible to mark the date and a thought to dedicate to Berlinguer and more generally to the exhibition. As we enter, we are immediately transported to an emotional dimension: the desk, the watch, and the glasses worn during his last political speech in Padua in 1984.
Alessandro D’Onofrio, one of the curators of the exhibition, welcomes visitors with the display of the politician’s personal effects. She explained to me that they represent “the core of the exhibition, the point of contact: a personal photo, a ‘fetish,’ able to bring the visitor closer to the character, an emotional bridge.” She added, “There must not be a cognitive effort; on the contrary, the emotional component that will accompany the visitors throughout the exhibition is very important.” Protected by display cases, we find photographs, postcards, and newspapers from Berlinguer’s lifetime, which intersect in a vivid exchange between the two themes of Enrico Berlinguer’s private life and his career.
Some of the exhibition’s archival material comes from the archive that preserves the cultural legacy of the founder of the Italian Communist Party, Antonio Gramsci (1891–1937). The curators organized the content according to five thematic sections the curators use to initiate an open dialogue with the public: the affections, the leader, the Italian crisis, the global dimension, contemporaneity and the future. The sections give rhythm to the exhibition, like the multiple windows of an open browser, leading to unexpected links that from the display cases refer to the satirical cartoons, posters hanging on the walls, TV screens, and audio recordings of the famous speeches of the Communist Party secretary.
Women in the square celebrating the Communist Party at a demonstration in 1978.
In order to render a well-rounded portrait of Berlinguer, the exhibition also features sub-themes: the Italian Communist Party’s contribution to the reforms adopted in Italy from 1968 to 1984, years characterized by a strong ferment of the population during the so-called “class struggle”; the dramatic and constant violence of those years, which included fascist massacres and the kidnappings by the Red Brigades of the secretary of the Christian Democrat part Aldo Moro. The tumult can still be felt today since the real instigators of those massacres are still unknown.
The almost frenetic rhythm of the exhibition is broken by a secluded room where a more subdued environment, suitable for study, has been recreated, like that of a typical Italian living room of the late 1960s. This period room is furnished with the furniture of the time. We find a table of contents available to visitors listing the books that enlightened and guided Berlinguer’s thinking. The books, which include texts by Nietzsche, Aristotle, Machiavelli, Carducci, and Kant, comprise Berlinguer’s personal library. In addition to books on philosophy, we also find a well-stocked selection of texts from the religious-Catholic sphere. Berlinguer was an atheist, but having familiarity with these texts facilitated successful dialogue with religious institutions.
The exhibition uses a mix of traditional museum interpretive techniques along with more contemporary ones. For example, the center of the two pavilions includes three impressive video installations. These resemble light curtains that initially play with the shyness of the spectator who keeps his distance for fear of touching a work. They philosophically recall the veil of Maya that must be torn to finally have access to the real world. We are therefore invited to cross them, putting aside all insecurity. On them, continuous projections refer to the restless political climate of the fateful ’68 and the following decade. The idea is to invoke the militant spirit of the time: crossing them, we enter a procession. The projected images are precisely those of the great demonstrations, such as the one for the divorce law. The images imprint in our memory a sort of shared flashback even if we never lived through those years.
More notes, images and photographs paper the walls of the former slaughterhouse: two enlarged black and white photographs depict Berlinguer together with Yasser Arafat, leader of the Palestine Liberation Organization, before Arafat had won a Nobel Peace Prize.
Among the many historical moments recalled in the exhibition, Berlinguer’s voice echoes from the loudspeakers with ovations from the crowd listening to his speeches, indicating once again his closeness to the proletarian class. What also strikes young visitors is the great participation in the public debate for the discussion of ideas that later became laws, such as the right to abortion that came into force in 1978.
The sensation that continues to grow when approaching the end of the exhibition is frustration. The speeches of the secretary of the Communist Party seem a distant echo that makes him almost unfamiliar compared to the political debates that take place today more and more on TV and on the social media site X. Faded political thoughts increasingly take on the function of slogans or catchphrases with the aim of receiving as many interactions and shares as possible under a post.
This phenomenon could be seen as the natural evolution of a process that began in the early 1990s with the Tangentopoli scandal. During this period, numerous Italian politicians and businessman were arrested exchanging money. Simultaneously, Berlusconi centralized Italian TV successfully constructing a new leader-showman. This shift collapsed the communal dimension of politics, transforming it into an instrument of personal affirmation. Opponents became enemies to be beaten through gags shared on TV and social networks, a trend that continues to the present day.
Towards the end of the tour, I asked myself: What could an exhibition dedicated to a modern-day politician look like, even twenty, thirty years from now? In such a fast-paced age that leaves no time for information to settle and is as nervous as a finger impatiently scrolling the phone screen for the latest video, what could we exhibit of contemporary politicians?
According to the curators, the last section, “contemporaneity and the future,” is dedicated to people who have never seen a live speech by Berlinguer, those who have never had a party card, or those who are my age and who find out about party programs for elections through very succinct, one-minute reels on Instagram. The mixture of video, audio, and visual installations look like the many windows on our Internet pages, which can be opened at the same time, even simultaneously.
The exhibition also presents itself as an archive and research hub: in one section, desks have been set up with computers on which one can access the online section of the Gramsci Archive and view the entire archive holdings. The aim, according to the curator, is to offer tools for interpreting the context in which we live. The research hub, as well as the exhibition, are free of charge and allow unlimited visitor admission. At the hub, visitors are invited to use the monitors to do research, interrogate the archive, and unearth new, unexplored paths.
When I visited the exhibition, as I made my way toward the exit, I marked my name and the date on the large book that had greeted me earlier at the entrance and start leafing through it, looking for comments from my peers. One person wrote, “I would have loved to have known you.” Another wrote, “I miss you even though I have never met you.” Through the nostalgia of an era I never lived through, there emerges a desire to be able to relive in the present even an echo of those ideals which I was only able to glimpse for a few moments: belonging to a party, with the conviction that a result could really be achieved through demonstrations, and above all through voting. It was an era so distant that it can only speak to us through the memorabilia of an exhibition in a contemporaneity where politics no longer seems to interest anyone, where in a country like Italy, abstention from voting in the last elections in 2022 was at its highest peak, around 63.9 per cent.
A vastly different result from the 1972 elections, when Berlinguer was elected secretary of PCI and voter turnout exceeded 93%. That era of mass participation seems unattainable today, with only an exhibition to remind us that it was once possible.