Bonino Is Buried, and the Districts Count What She Argued For

Emma Bonino, the Italian politician and feminist activist, has died aged 78, and Italy's political world turned out on Tuesday for her state funeral, according to The Local Italy. The Guardian's obituary records the shape of her life: she joined the Radical party, fought a long campaign for women's rights, and in 1974, told by a doctor that she was sterile, became pregnant and sought an abortion in a country where the procedure was then illegal.

She went on to serve as a government minister and as a European commissioner, and the funeral drew the country's political class, The Local reported. The Guardian notes that she was a co-founder of the Radical party and a figure who carried civil-liberties arguments from street campaigns into institutions.

In the Marche, where the economy rests on small manufacturing districts, leather and footwear, furniture and mechanical workshops, the arguments Bonino made about rights and about the state's reach are read alongside a narrower question: what a dispersed, ageing region can still count on from Rome and Brussels. Her European record is the part the region's own firms follow most closely.