Rome Bids Farewell to Emma Bonino, the Feminist Who Reshaped Italian Politics

Italy's political world turned out in Rome on Tuesday for the state funeral of Emma Bonino, the former government minister, European commissioner and feminist campaigner who died at the age of 78, according to The Local Italy. The Guardian, in its obituary, traces a career that began in the Radical party and ran through five decades of campaigns for women's rights, civil liberties and, latterly, the cause of assisted dying.

The Guardian records that Bonino was pregnant in 1974 and, having been told by a doctor that she was sterile, sought an abortion at a time when the procedure was largely illegal in Italy. That experience, the paper writes, helped set the course of her public life. She went on to serve as a minister in Italian governments and as Italy's European commissioner, and she remained a sitting senator in the closing years of her life.