He passed away today after a long illness. Marco Pannella. With him goes a piece of our history: he was 86 years old and for more than sixty he represented a point of reference in the world of Italian politics, within which he was a unique and immediately recognizable figure, instinctively different.
Pannella was one of the founders of Radical Party of Democrats and Liberals, in 1955, and since then he has been the charismatic father of a movement that has always recognized itself in his figure. A figure to whom, today and in recent days, the entire world of our politics has paid homage.
Pannella was a man, just like his long speeches, impossible to synthesize. Radical (the Radical par excellence, in the Italian scene), socialist, liberal, anti-clerical, anti-prohibitionist, anti-militarist and non-violent. A sea of labels called to an impossible task: to try to reduce to a category that would make comprehensible (or computable) a personality of those who would be defined, beyond the pool called the Atlantic, “bigger than life”.
A man impossible to categorize even for some disputes, for that political spectrum crossed lightly (perhaps too much), from side to side, with that pinch of ambiguity to shade the basic coherence of a man who used his position, together with his body and his image, to face hundreds of civil battles that have helped to change the face of our country, from that for the divorce to that for theabortion, passing through the legalization of soft drugs and the amnesty, for which in 2011, at the age of 81, he faced a hunger strike that lasted three months.
And just the many hunger strikes they represented one of the signs of Pannella's uniqueness, and one of the reasons for his notoriety, especially among the younger ones. That the body that leaves him today was perhaps the first body to enter by force, with all its weight, on the scene of Italian politics. An instrument body and a non-violent weapon body, which has fought and won many battles and, like any other body, has finally lost its war. With the honor of arms.
