Milan Bids Farewell to Bonino as the Foreign Press Counts a Political Estate

Italy's political class turned out on Tuesday for the state funeral of Emma Bonino, the feminist campaigner, former government minister and European commissioner who died aged 78, according to The Local Italy. The Guardian's obituary traces her from a 1974 pregnancy — after a doctor had told her she was sterile — through an attempted abortion and into the Radical party's long campaign for women's rights.

For the foreign desks, the through-line is institutional rather than personal: a politician who held office in Rome and Brussels without ever belonging to the large parties that trade in it. That distance is the reason the obituaries read as European as much as Italian.

Milan's own account of her is narrower and more practical. The city's professional and financial classes are the constituency most exposed to the EU files Bonino handled — budget, humanitarian aid, trade — and least served by a domestic party system that has thinned out its liberal centre.