Twenty years have passed since the Italian Communists last Congress in 1991, in
which the death of their party was decreed. It was a deliberate death,
accelerated by the desire for a new beginning. That new beginning never came,
and the world lost an invaluable, complex political, organizational and
theoretical heritage. In this detailed and probing work, Lucio Magri, one of the
towering intellectual figures of the Italian Left, assesses the causes for the
demise of what was once one of the most powerful and vibrant communist parties
of the West. The PCI marked almost a century of Italian history, from its
founding in 1921 to the