The Outsider's Obituary: How the World Buries Italy's Radicals

The Guardian called her a radical who stood up to the Vatican; the New York Times called her a campaigner for civil rights who helped erode the political sway of the Catholic Church. Both are true, and both are partial. Emma Bonino, who died this week at 78, spent nearly five decades in Italian politics, and the obituaries written abroad have fixed her in a particular frame: the secular warrior against clerical power. It is a frame that says as much about the foreign press as it does about the woman.

This is not a complaint. The world's newspapers are right that the battles over abortion and divorce were defining episodes in postwar Italy, and right that Bonino was central to them. But the framing reveals a persistent habit in foreign coverage: Italy is legible to outsiders chiefly through the Church, through the culture wars the Church provoked, and through the personalities who fought them. A politician who spent years on European integration, on humanitarian corridors, on the mechanics of Brussels and the United Nations, is remembered abroad above all for the fights that can be narrated as Rome versus modernity.

We note this without irony, because we are part of the same apparatus. La Veduta reads Italy through the foreign wires; we cannot pretend to a vantage we do not hold. What the Guardian and the Times have given us this week is a portrait of a politician as the world preferred to see her — a figure of liberal conscience in a country the world still imagines as chiefly Catholic. That imagination is not wrong. It is simply narrower than the life.

There is a lesson here about how Italy is reported at one remove. The obituaries are generous, and they are accurate in their particulars. But they measure an Italian career by the distance it travelled from the Vatican, and by that measure they make the Church the protagonist even in a story about its most determined adversary. Bonino deserved better than to be defined by what she opposed, and so does the country the world keeps describing.