I don't know if Claudio Martelli's “Remember to Live” is a successful book from a political point of view, nor can I venture a judgment on the literary value of the almost six hundred pages of an autobiography that is not only political, but above all political. Because, as Pietro Nenni himself taught us, politics is above all "a great human fact", in which I believe passions, feelings and, why not, sometimes, vigorous and melancholic resentments are mixed.
And Martelli's story unfolds by intertwining these attitudes of the human soul with the chronicle of difficult years in the history of our country: the hopes with the birth of the first center-left in the sixties and the attempt, unfortunately failed, of socialist unification and then XNUMX, the decline of the alliance that had its pivot in the DC and the socialists, the subsequent attempts (failed perhaps because they were not very convinced) to create the conditions for a left-wing alternative, and then the collapse or rather the crumbling end of the first Republic, under the blows of the public prosecutors and Mani Pulite. All of this in a country crossed by the season of mafia massacres, but not only mafia ones, by the poisons on the functioning and therefore on the deviations of the secret services, and then by terrorism and the years of lead, culminating in the Moro crime.
Naturally, Martelli's story is above all the story of a socialist leader who, after a very brief interlude among the republicans, lands in the Corso Monforte section of the PSI. to the group of Milanese socialists, to his friendship with Bettino Craxi, and to his acquaintance with the Milanese autonomists: from Tognoli to Finetti. Yes, because in Milan, even during De Martino's long secretariat, there were above all the Nennians. And it is no coincidence that Martelli tells of when, with great generosity, Craxi asked him to accompany him to Crans sur Sierre in Val d'Aosta to visit the old leader of the socialists. There is also a beautiful photograph where a Craxi in a heavy woolen jacket and a Nenni leaning on his cane are accompanied by a Martelli completely wrapped in one or more blankets.
We started from Nenni, but Martelli in his political history is above all the one who tried to modernize not only the party, but the political strategy of the Italian socialists. And in this sense, his speech at the PSI programmatic conference in Rimini should be remembered above all. We were in the early 80s, the socialists were still in government with the DC, but we were also starting to think about the left alternative. Martelli's speech that went into the news as the one "on merit and need" sought first of all to identify who would be the interlocutors of the socialists of the 80s. These were "all those placed in the conditions determined by need and all individuals possessing a merit" because "whatever the need and whatever the merit, only those who can act because they want or because they have to are the recipients of reform actions" .
I was also in Rimini that time to recount the conference to the readers of "Il sole 24 ore" and I remember that Martelli's reasoning reminded me of what, as a teenager, I had heard Giuseppe Saragat say at a rally in Naples, when he explained that the goal of democratic socialists and reformists was not to make all men equal, but to grant everyone the same starting conditions, because only in this way could merit play its part. Martelli recounts: “Rimini's speech was interrupted by repeated applause, and by a final five-minute ovation, with all the delegates standing and not a few with tears in their eyes. Only Craxi remained seated”.
A few years later, more or less on the eve of the collapse of Tangentopoli, it was once again Craxi who froze Martelli in a meeting of the PSI management. On the agenda was the self-reform of the party announced several times, Martelli was preparing to illustrate his proposals in this sense, but Bettino stopped him with a "not now, Claudio". Yet, despite the fact that the book overlooks not only some different evaluations between the two leaders of reformist socialism, but also a certain resentment on the part of Martelli with respect to some of Craxi's choices (for example when he indicated to Scalfaro the three names for the position to form the government, adding that Amato, De Michelis and Martelli were in not only alphabetical order), the reasons that unite the socialist history of the two leaders are far greater than those of division. Both, with merits, demerits and personal dramas, spent themselves on the modernization of socialism and the Italian left.
Finally, one last consideration: at the end of a book that tells the painful story of the last years of the historic party of Italian socialism, those who have followed and partially lived those stories remain, above all, with a bitter melancholy for when politics was still politics.
