But for those of us who were members then, Communism was not only a cluster of political aspirations: it was also the fusion of these with our cultural and literary aspirations. I remember when, in my provincial city, the first copies of l’Unità arrived after the Liberation. I opened the Milan edition: its deputy editor was Elio Vittorini. I opened the Turin edition: Cesare Pavese was writing on the cultural page. As luck would have it, these were my two favourite Italian writers, about whom I knew nothing up until then except two of their books and some of their translations. And now I discovered that they were in the field that I too had chosen: I thought this was how it had to be. And similarly the discovery that the painter Guttuso was a Communist! And Picasso too! That ideal of a culture that was integral to political struggle appeared to us in those days as part of natural reality. (But in fact it was not like that: we were to bang our head against the brick wall of the relationship between politics and culture for fifteen years, and the problem is still not solved.)