After 1945, the Italian Communist Party (PCI) rose from obscurity to become the largest and most respectable in the West. In a country still permeated by reaction and obscurantism, Italian intellectuals were central to the organization’s rapid growth. They were the “engineers of souls” (in the words of the Congress of Soviet Writers in 1934) and agents of national renewal.

Rossana Rossanda was a partisan, journalist, and writer who represented the very best of the Communist generation recruited by the PCI between 1943 and 1945. After her exclusion from the party in 1969, she became a leading figure on the global revolutionary left and remained loyal to the idea of communism until her death in 2020. She will be remembered for her outstanding memoir, The Comrade From Milan; the communist newspaper il manifesto, which she cofounded; and her studies on the history of socialism.