L'Aquila Reads the Bonino Funeral as a Chapter in a Longer Fight

Italy's political class turned out on Tuesday for the state funeral of Emma Bonino, the former government minister, European commissioner and Radical party activist, according to The Local Italy. She was 78. The Guardian's obituary, published on Tuesday, opens not with her offices but with a private crisis in 1974: a doctor had told her she was sterile, she became pregnant, and she sought an abortion in a country where the procedure was still illegal.

That opening is the Guardian's argument, and it is a fair one. Bonino's public life ran from the Radical party's campaigns of the 1970s through ministerial office and a seat in Brussels, and the obituary presents the whole of it as an extension of the fight over women's rights that began in that year. The Local Italy's account of the funeral notes the turnout of the political world; the Guardian supplies the shape of the biography.

Neither account is a local story. L'Aquila has no claim on Bonino's career, and this bureau will not manufacture one. What the foreign coverage does record is a death, a funeral, and a contested legislative record — the last of these still live in the Italian Parliament, where the Senate voted on Tuesday on an electoral reform bill that now passes to the Chamber of Deputies, per The Local Italy.