These are difficult times for the Italian left. Seemingly headed for a thorough (and many would say well-deserved) drubbing at next year's general election, the ruling centre-left could only stand idly by last week as the daily L'Unita, the one-time official newspaper of the former Italian Communist Party (PCI), was forced to close in all but an Internet edition (www.unita.it).
For Irish readers who did not grow up in a country lacerated by Cold War politics for the first 40 years of the post-war era, the loss of a party newspaper such as L'Unita might seem a matter of no significance. For a generation of Italians, however, L'Unita was a daily talisman of left-wing values, opinions and politics with which to oppose the ruling and always-in-power Christian Democrat oligarchy.
It would be easy, indeed perhaps correct, to conclude that for a paper like L'Unita, time is up. It has served its historical purpose. Yet, in a democracy in which the leader of the centreright opposition and probable next prime minister - Mr Silvio Berlusconi - controls three nationwide TV channels, not to mention his own daily paper, Il Giornale, perhaps the passing of a voice traditionally opposed to the right is to be mourned.
Founded in 1924 by Antonio Gramsci, the historical father of the PCI, L'Unita experienced a precarious existence under Mussolini before being relaunched in 1945 by the party leader, Mr Palmiro Togliatti. It enjoyed a tremendous boom in the post-war years, with its circulation touching 300,000 copies in the 1950s and 1960s in a period when it regularly sold a million copies on special left-wing occasions such as Labour Day on May 1st.
L'Unita in those days was a peculiar paper, combining a rigidly orthodox Stalinist hard line in politics with arts and sports pages in which writer Italo Calvino was a regular contributor and in which the poet Alfonso Gatto was "our man" on the Tour of Italy cycle race. The paper's pro-Stalin line makes for embarrassing, if not to say shameful, reading these days. When Stalin died in 1953, the headline on the March 6th copy of L'Unita read: "The Man Who Has Done Most For The Liberation Of The Human Race Is Dead".
The ghosts of millions who perished in Stalin's gulags might choose to differ.
Both L'Unita and the Italian Communist party, however, have come a long way in the meantime. It could be argued that L'Unita's time was up just as soon as the old PCI, back in 1989, began its determined march down the road to social democracy, casting off both the label "communist" (the party is now called Democratic Left) and (subsequently) the hammer and sickle symbol in gestures intended to underline a fundamental change of socio-political direction.
There are those, however (and not just on the left), who do not necessarily see it that way. The "death" of L'Unita was marked by significant gestures of solidarity. For a start, there was the seemingly futile gesture of an 80year-old pensioner, Ms Maria Antonietta Bubnich, who turned up at the newspaper's central Rome offices to personally deliver a cheque for £400. "For 50 years, I've opened up this paper every day, thinking to myself, this lot are thinking about me and my problems," she said.
Then, too, came encouragement from unexpected sources such as the ex-fascist Alleanza Nazionale daily, Secolo d'Italia, which expressed a desire to have its old enemy back. Two other rival dailies, Corriere Della Sera and Il Manifesto, have both set aside editorial space for L'Unita, because as Corriere writes: "The voice of L'Unita, even if we do not always agree with it, is an important one for Italian culture and democracy."
In market terms, L'Unita's old-fashioned, hidebound attitudes cost it dearly, seeing it lose out above all to the 1976-founded liberal Rome daily La Repubblica. Whereas the students of sessantotto (the late 1960s demonstrations) all read L'Unita, their successors today are more likely to read tabloid-sized quality-cum-yuppie paper La Repubblica. Whilst commercial dailies like Repubblica and Corriere now sell 650,000700,000 daily, sales of L'Unita have dropped to 50,000.
Democratic Left (DS) has long known which way the wind blew with regard to L'Unita's future and the cost of keeping it going (the paper is estimated to be £40 million in debt). The current DS heavyweights - the party leader, Mr Walter Veltroni, and the ex-prime minister, Mr Massimo D'Alema, - are both former editors of the paper. Mr D'Alema was partly responsible for the 1998 semi-privatisation that was intended to arrest the paper's decline.
When Mr D'Alema showed up at the paper's offices last Thursday, he was greeted with cries of "liar", "cretin" and "fool" from angry journalists, many of whom were former colleagues and all of whom, one presumes, vote for Democratic Left. As Mr D'Alema left the newspaper building, one disillusioned pundit quipped: "Was he wearing his thousand pound shoes today?"
Perhaps unfairly, Mr D'Alema, more than anyone else, tends to be seen as the centre-left leader who led his followers away from the steep and narrow path of leftist purity and down the road of dirty, day to day political compromise. Mr D'Alema's own all too obviously blind ambition and his possible role in the downfall of a previous prime minister, Mr Romano Prodi, hardly help his cause in many left-wing quarters.
Perhaps the closure of L'Unita is symbolic of the confusion currently faced by the left. Neither the paper nor the party seems to know where they want to go, nor have the means of getting there, even if they did.
For the time being, L'Unita has at least found a direction, that of the Internet, where it remains alive if not especially well. As for the party, its direction, not to mention its director, remain matters clothed in the mists of future time.