Emma Bonino, 78, Dies; the Foreign Press Writes Her Life as a Long Argument

Emma Bonino, the Italian politician, feminist and activist, has died at the age of 78. The Guardian published her obituary on Tuesday, and The Local Italy reported the state funeral held the same day, describing a political class that turned out for a former government minister, European commissioner and campaigner.

The Guardian's account begins not with an office but with a year: 1974, when Bonino, then a young activist who had been told by a doctor that she was sterile, became pregnant and sought an abortion. From that experience the obituary traces a life in the Radical party and a long, public battle over women's rights — the kind of career the foreign press tends to describe as a sequence of campaigns rather than a ladder of appointments.

The Local's report of the funeral supplies the other half of the picture: the institutional recognition, the presence of the political world, the sense that a figure who spent decades outside the comfortable centre of Italian power was, at the end, claimed by it.