The title of Rossana Rossanda’s 2005 memoir called her a “Girl of the Last Century.” Published in English as The Comrade from Milan, the tone of Rossanda’s book reflected the Italian left’s rapid slide into disaster. Not only were its glory days now long in the past, but their “glorious” character was widely put into doubt even by former communists.

Rossanda, who died on Sunday, aged ninety-six, had been a communist since the period of World War II, becoming the partisan “Miranda” aged nineteen in 1943 before joining the Italian Communist Party (PCI) in 1946. But while in postwar years she took up leading roles in the PCI’s cultural work, in 1969 she and her comrades were pushed out of the party.

In the decades after the PCI’s dissolution in 1991, Rossanda and her comrades from the manifesto group — creators of the eponymous dissident-communist newspaper, still now a daily — would write the most interesting works on the legacy of twentieth-century communism, including both her memoir and her comrade Lucio Magri’s The Tailor of Ulm.