A place for Berlinguer

“Berlinguer was a great man and a great politician. I owe him all my thanks, even though I was always a man of the right-wing party.”

This is what my father murmured when pictures of Enrico Berlinguer (1922-1984) were shown on television in the news to mark the centenary of his birth last February.

What significance did Berlinguer have 100 years after his birth?

Enrico Berlinguer was secretary of the Italian Communist Party (PCI) from 1972 until his death from a stroke during a rally in Padua. He joined the PCI in 1943 and, like other young people of his generation, became a communist because of his interest in anti-fascism. When Berlinguer was elected secretary of the PCI, Italian society was undergoing a transformation, driven by the student protests of 1968 and the workers’ strikes of the “Hot Autumn”. But it was also shaken by the Neo-fascist massacre on Piazza Fontana in December 1969Berlinguer’s PCI wanted to give political outlet to the country’s desire for renewal and to defend the republican institutions by strengthening relations with the democratic forces in the country: Berlinguer conceived the “Historic Compromise”, an attempt to reach an agreement with the Christian Democrats to govern the country jointly with the then President Aldo Moro, who was later ousted by the Red Brigades.

Enrico Berlinguer meets workers of the Leuna works during a visit to East Germany, 1973. (Images courtesy of (Video lab for monkeys.)

Now his life is being made accessible to the public for the first time in a museum exhibition at the Mattatoio in Rome: I love the probation of Enrico Berlinguer (The places and words of Enrico Berlinguer).

The Mattatoio was built in the Testaccio district in the last two decades of the 19th century and was once used for the slaughter of animals. The exhibition space consists of two large sheds, called pavilions, facing each other like two imposing bastions. The pavilions are surrounded by a levelled area. Outside you can still see the enclosures that once housed the animals waiting to be slaughtered. The bars, which have since been restored, were freedThe exhibition, which celebrates the career of one of Italy’s most important politicians, who dedicated much of his life to workers’ struggles, could only be shown in such a place, a place that once belonged to the proletariat, the social class to which the party secretary was closest.

The exhibition is divided into two pavilions, which house galleries 9a and 9b. In the first gallery, visitors are greeted by a large book in which they can write the date and a thought they would like to dedicate to Berlinguer and, more generally, to the exhibition. Upon entering, they are immediately transported to an emotional dimension: the desk, the watch and the glasses he wore during his last political speech in Padua in 1984.

Alessandro D’Onofrio, one of the curators of the exhibition, welcomes visitors with an exhibition of the politician’s personal objects. She explained to me that these “represent the heart of the exhibition, the point of contact: a personal photograph, a ‘fetish’ that can bring the visitor closer to the figure, an emotional bridge.” She added: “There must be no cognitive effort; on the contrary, the emotional component that accompanies the visitor throughout the exhibition is very important.” Protected by display cases, we find photographs, postcards and newspapers from Berlinguer’s lifetime, which intersect in a lively exchange between the two themes of Enrico Berlinguer’s private life and his career.

Some of the exhibition’s archival materials come from the archive that preserves the cultural heritage of the founder of the Italian Communist Party, Antonio Gramsci (1891-1937). The curators have divided the content into five thematic sections, with which they initiate an open dialogue with the public: the affections, the leader, the Italian crisis, the global dimension, the present and the future. The sections give rhythm to the exhibition, like the many windows of an open browser, and lead to unexpected links that lead from the display cases to the satirical cartoons, the posters hanging on the walls, television screens and audio recordings of the famous speeches of the Secretary of the Communist Party.

Women in the square celebrate the Communist Party during a demonstration in 1978.

In order to paint a comprehensive portrait of Berlinguer, the exhibition also covers sub-themes: the contribution of the Italian Communist Party to the reforms carried out in Italy between 1968 and 1984, years marked by strong popular ferment during the so-called “class struggle”; the dramatic and constant violence of those years, which included fascist massacres and the kidnapping of the secretary of the Christian Democratic Party, Aldo Moro, by the Red Brigades. The tumult is still felt today, as the real instigators of these massacres are still unknown.

The almost hectic rhythm of the exhibition is interrupted by a secluded room that recreates a more subdued environment, suitable for study, like that of a typical Italian living room of the late 1960s. This contemporary space is furnished with the furniture of the period. Visitors are provided with a table of contents listing the books that have enlightened and guided Berlinguer’s thought. The books, including texts by Nietzsche, Aristotle, Machiavelli, Carducci and Kant, make up Berlinguer’s personal library. In addition to books on philosophy, we also find a well-stocked selection of texts from the religious-Catholic sphere. Berlinguer was an atheist, but familiarity with these texts facilitated his successful dialogue with religious institutions.

The exhibition uses a mixture of traditional and contemporary interpretation techniques of the museum. In the centre of the two pavilions there are three impressive video installations. These resemble light curtains, which initially play on the shyness of the viewer, who keeps his distance for fear of touching a work. They are philosophically reminiscent of the veil of Maya that must be torn apart in order to finally have access to the real world. We are therefore invited to cross them, putting aside all insecurities. On them, continuous projections refer to the turbulent political climate of the fateful 1968 and the decade that followed. The idea is to invoke the militant spirit of the time: when we cross them, we enter a procession. The projected images are precisely those of the great demonstrations, such as those for the divorce law. The images imprint in our memory a kind of shared flashback, even if we never lived through those years.

More notes, pictures and photos cover the walls of the former slaughterhouse: Two enlarged black-and-white photos show Berlinguer together with Yasser Arafat, the leader of the Palestine Liberation Organization, before Arafat received the Nobel Peace Prize.

Among the many historical moments recalled in the exhibition, Berlinguer’s voice resounds from the loudspeakers and is cheered by the crowds listening to his speeches, demonstrating once again his closeness to the working class. What also strikes young visitors is the high level of participation in the public debate on ideas that later became laws, such as the right to abortion, which came into force in 1978.

The feeling that grows towards the end of the exhibition is frustration. The speeches of the Communist Party Secretary seem like a distant echo, making him seem almost alien compared to the political debates that are now increasingly taking place on television and social media site X. Faded political ideas increasingly take on the function of slogans or catchphrases with the aim of getting as many interactions and shares as possible under a post.

This phenomenon can be seen as a natural evolution of a process that began in the early 1990s with the Tangentopoli Scandal. During this period, numerous Italian politicians and businessmen were arrested while exchanging money. At the same time, Berlusconi centralized Italian television, successfully building a new leader and showman. This change collapsed the communal dimension of politics and turned it into an instrument of personal affirmation. Opponents became enemies who had to be defeated through gags on television and social networks – a trend that continues to this day.

Towards the end of the tour, I asked myself: What might an exhibition about a contemporary politician look like in twenty or thirty years? In such a fast-moving world, where there is hardly any time to process information and it is as nervous as a finger impatiently searching for the latest video on a mobile phone screen, what could we exhibit from contemporary politicians?

The final section, “Contemporary and Future,” is, according to the curators, dedicated to people who have never seen a live speech by Berlinguer, who have never had a party card, or who are my age and learn about party programs for elections via very concise, one-minute film sequences on Instagram. The mix of video, audio and visual installations acts like the many windows on our websites that can be opened simultaneously, even simultaneously.

The exhibition also presents itself as an archive and research center: in one area, desks with computers are set up where you can access the online area of ​​the Gramsci Archive and view the entire archive holdings. The aim, says the curator, is to offer tools for interpreting the context in which we live. The research center and the exhibition are free and allow visitors unlimited access. In the center, visitors are invited to research on the monitors, question the archive and find new, unexplored paths.

When I visited the exhibition and made my way to the exit, I marked my name and the date in the large book that had greeted me earlier at the entrance and began to leaf through it, looking for comments from my colleagues. One person wrote: “I would have liked to have known you.” Another wrote: “I miss you even though I never met you.” Nostalgia for an era I never lived through gives rise to a desire to be able to relive in the present at least an echo of those ideals that I was able to glimpse for only a few moments: to belong to a party with the belief that through demonstrations and, above all, by voting, a result could actually be achieved. It was an era so far back that it can only speak to us through the memorabilia of an exhibition in a contemporary society where politics no longer seems to interest anyone, where in a country like Italy, abstention reached its highest level in the last elections in 2022, at around 63.9 percent.

A very different result from the 1972 elections, when Berlinguer was elected Secretary of the PCI and the turnout was over 93%. That era of mass participation seems unattainable today, and only an exhibition reminds us that it was once possible.