A Pair of Red Sneakers

“You see, I had left the scene to make room for the new leaders, but, given the results, I have been wrong...”, Massimo D’Alema says amid applauses and cheers. 53rd Italian Prime Minister from 1998 to 2000, and first Italian and NATO country’s Prime Minister to come from a Communist Party thus started over again from Tricase, Apulia, Italy his “mission impossible” – to carry Pietro Grasso’s new party Liberi e Uguali (Free and Equal) into parliament. “Once upon a time this was a Catholic Christian Democratic comune: the Italian Communist Party counted two municipal councilors, the Christian Democracy twenty-two... I remember the first time I came here, in the 1980s: we mounted the stage outside Tricase’s beautiful Matrix Church and when the people got out at the end of the Mass, as soon as they saw the hammer and sickle, they ran away. The parish priest was the only one who remained on the churchyard listening to me. His name was Don Tonino Bello. This time I was invited by a Catholic association and I’m gonna be speaking in the parish theatre”.

Massimo D’Alema visiting a shoe factory on the way of his electoral campaign. Photo: La Stampa.