Italy Buries Emma Bonino, the Feminist Who Fought the State and Won

Italy's political world turned out on Tuesday for the state funeral of Emma Bonino, the former government minister, European commissioner and feminist campaigner who died at 78, according to The Local Italy. The Guardian's obituary records that Bonino joined the Radical party and fought a long battle for women's rights, becoming one of the most recognisable Italian figures in Brussels and in the country's frequent protest campaigns.

The Guardian traces her political formation to 1974, when, having been told by a doctor that she was sterile, she became pregnant and attempted to get an abortion in a country where the procedure was then illegal. That experience, the obituary notes, set the direction of her public life: abortion rights, divorce, and the legal battles that the Radicals pursued through referendums and court challenges rather than through the established party machines.

Her career carried her from the Italian Parliament to the European Commission, where she held the portfolio for humanitarian aid, and later to the foreign ministry and the Senate. The Local Italy describes her as a fighter, and the tributes reported on Monday and Tuesday suggest a political class that disagreed with her often but regarded her as a fixed point of the Republic's public argument.