Luciana Castellina was born in Rome in 1929. She joined the Italian Communist Party (PCI) in 1947 and went on to become a leading figure in the life of the Italian Left from the 1960s onwards. Excluded from the PCI for her part in the oppositional journal il manifesto, in 1974 she co-founded the Partito di Unità Proletaria per il communismo (PdUP), and in the late seventies led the party’s parliamentary fraction as part of the united list of Democrazia Proletaria. In 1984 the PdUP decided to migrate to the PCI—the critical juncture at which Castellina gave this interview.

Just a few years later, the PCI voted to remake itself as a party of the ‘democratic left’ (PDS). The former PdUP refused to follow, and joined with other recusant Communists and elements of the New Left to create Rifondazione Comunista. Then, in 1995, Rifondazione split over the issue of parliamentary support for the centrist government of Lamberto Dini. At this point, Castellina and her co-thinkers, who favoured support for Dini, launched the Movimento dei Comunisti Unitari, remaining until a majority decided to dissolve themselves into a new centre-Left, Democratici di Sinistra. Once again, she declined the invitation to overwrite her Communist identity.

From 1979 to 1999, Castellina was a member of the European parliament. She has been at different times editor of the Communist youth magazine Nuovo Generazione, the daily manifesto and the weekly Liberazione. Her books include Eurollywood: il difficile ingresso della cultura nella construzione dell’Europa (2008).