Italy Buries Emma Bonino, the Feminist Who Fought the State and Then Joined It

Italy's political world turned out on Tuesday for the state funeral of Emma Bonino, a former government minister, EU commissioner and feminist campaigner, The Local Italy reported. She was 78. The Guardian, in its obituary published the same day, traced the shape of a life that began in confrontation with Italian law and ended inside the institutions that had once prosecuted her allies.

The Guardian's account opens in 1974, when Bonino — told by a doctor that she was sterile — became pregnant, sought an abortion and found the procedure effectively unavailable. That experience, the obituary makes clear, was the origin of a public career rather than an aside to it. She joined the Radical party and spent the following decades on campaigns for divorce, abortion and civil rights, causes that put her at odds with the Christian Democrat establishment and, at times, with the law itself.

The funeral drew the country's political class, according to The Local Italy, which described a state tribute to a figure who had held ministerial office and served as Italy's European Commissioner. The two accounts differ in register rather than fact: one is a life told through its battles, the other a national ceremony closing it.