There are many watersheds that cut through the Italian left’s history: in its life before and after the Italian Communist Party (PCI), before and after the birth of the Democratic Party (PD) in 2007, but also, perhaps most importantly, before and after Giorgio Napolitano. By some curious fate, Napolitano, throughout his life a leading figure in the PCI — he was himself born only four years after its creation at the Livorno Congress in 1921 — arrived at his historical function only after reaching eighty years of age, when he was elected president of the republic in 2006.

Napolitano had surely also made some history in the PCI’s ranks. He always represented this party’s social democratic calling, stubbornly held in check by a leadership group which could not make this concession to the Socialist cousins from whom they had split at Livorno in 1921, even if the party was effectively heading in that direction. The PCI kept the Communist name: because of loyalty to its lineage, because of care for its brand, because of its reference to a popular base forged in the great struggles following World War II. Even after the PCI announced a name change under leader Achille Occhetto in 1989, it opted for progressive-hued “Democratic Party of the Left,” rather than getting mixed up with the term “socialist,” now soiled by the record of Bettino Craxi’s Italian Socialist Party (PSI).

Napolitano, however, who grew up in Naples under the protective wing of the most right-wing and most Stalinist of Communist leaders, Giorgio Amendola, cultivated a moderate communism, open to the middle classes, yet never breaking with the parent company. Take the Eighth Congress of the PCI, in 1956, immediately after the tragic events in Hungary when Soviet tanks suppressed the revolt in Budapest. Responding to the clear stance taken by Antonio Giolitti, who left the PCI in response to the events, Napolitano demurred: for him, “in addition to preventing Hungary from falling into chaos and counterrevolution” Moscow had “decisively contributed not only to defending the military and strategic interests of the USSR but to saving world peace.”