My 1977, and That of My Friends

I can’t identify with most of the articles I have read recently about the youth movement that swept through Italy forty years ago now, in 1977, as briefly and intensely as a storm. It seems to me that they are not referring to what was actually said, thought and felt by my friends and I, all those years ago. I’m not about to attempt a historical or sociological analysis, and I have no desire to mistake my own experience and that of some of my friends for some kind of historical fact. But at the time I know that there were many who felt as I did, and somewhere they must still exist. I’m writing this with them in mind, the many friends I had then, as well as for those who are curious about hearing an alternative version of the period.

Some of those friends have maintained a somewhat rose-tinted view of what, in their eyes, has become an almost mythical time. It was a moment of intense dialogue, of dreams, enthusiasm, yearning for change, of longing to build together an alternative and better world, which they now remember with equally intense nostalgia. So much so that they have tended to present everything that has happened since in our lives as drab by comparison. This is definitely not how I feel. We were in our twenties, and life at that age is frequently wonderful, and our experience of it heightened – especially in our memory of it. This is not the fragrance of history, it is the fragrance of youth. For me those events remain remarkable, even magical, but precisely due to the fact that they were the beginning of something. A path opened up for me. The life that followed was not greyer: I was part of a collective discovery of a spectrum of colour, and those colours have stayed with me. That said, the year after 1977 was undoubtedly experienced by many of us as a defeat. The bright desire to change the world which had momentarily seemed to open on to genuine possibilities had collided with a harsh reality. Shipwrecked by the violence of the reaction of the State, which we called at the time the repression, and then by the violence that we now call terrorism. There were many of us who believed and said that nothing good would come of the ‘armed struggle’ in Italy, that it was merely an extreme and foolish reaction, a desperate result of dreams that were over. The ‘wayward comrades’, many of us knew, were young men and women with a more absolute sense of morality than the rest of us; and therefore, as is unfortunately often the case, blinded by it. We wanted something different, and for a brief moment, along with many others, we had thought that change was coming; that it was possible to head in that direction.

Which direction? Dreams have a tendency to seem inconceivable as soon as they are over. But history shows that it is sometimes some of the most apparently inconceivable dreams that become reality: against the expectations of the ‘realists’, the French Revolution succeeds in bringing down the aristocracy and the ancien régime; Christianity prevails over pagan imperial Rome; a pupil of Aristotle conquers the world, and his friends establish libraries and centres of learning and research; the adherents of an Arab preacher transform the thoughts and lives of hundreds of millions of individuals … And so on.

More frequently, the big dreams founder against the force of daily life. They are short-lived or even momentary intervals; they come crashing down and are consigned to oblivion. History has so many streams that lead nowhere. The sects of the fourth century that wanted a church that was poor; the egalitarian mirage of Soviet Communism, the recent idea of restoring the Caliphate … But what frequently happens is more complex, and history follows tortuously winding courses. The Directory executes Robespierre, Wellington defeats Napoleon, and the King of France is restored to the throne. The revolution is quelled … But has it really been lost? Historical movements are made by ideas, ethical judgements, passions, ways of seeing the world. They often lead to a dead end. Sometimes, however, they leave behind traces that continue to work deeply upon the mental fabric of civilization, changing it irreversibly. Revolution is an old mole that burrows deep into the soil of history. On occasion, it pops its head out. It is the fantasy of those who rule that nothing will change. But then, the old mole appears when least expected. Our civilization, the set of values in which we believe, is the result of countless ideals, of the vision of those who have dared to look and to dream, intensely, beyond the present.

What is known as the Movement of 1977 in Italy is unintelligible when regarded in isolation. It was a late expression – not the last but one of the last, self-consciously so, and as a result of this all the more intense – of that dream which swept over not just Italy but the whole world in the sixties and seventies. These were years in which a significant global youth movement dared to dream, and to fervently hope that radical social change was possible. It certainly wasn’t a movement with a structured and coherent set of aims; in reality, it consisted of a thousand different streams. But despite their great diversity, all of these streams felt that they were part of the same river, sharing the same current – from the squares of Prague to the universities of Mexico City; from the campus of Berkeley to Piazza Verdi in Bologna; from hippy communes in California, both rural and urban, to South American guerrillas. And from Catholic marches in support of the Third World, to English experiments in anti-psychiatry, and from Taizé to Johannesburg. Despite the huge differences in specific attitudes, there was a prevailing awareness of belonging to the same great flow, of sharing a single great dream. Of being part of the same ‘struggle’, as it was commonly referred to at the time, to bring into existence a very different world.

It was a dream of building a world where there would be no huge social inequalities, no male domination of women: a place without borders, without armies, without poverty. It was the idea of replacing all competitive struggle for power with cooperation, of leaving behind the bigotries, fascisms, nationalisms, the narrow identitarianism that had led the preceding generations to exterminate 100 million human beings in two world wars. These were far-reaching dreams, envisaging a world without private property, without envy or jealousy, without hierarchy, without churches, without powerful states, without atomistic closed family units, without dogma. A world, in a word, that was free. Somewhere with no need for the excesses of consumerism, where you could work for pleasure, not for getting, spending or social climbing.

Just mentioning these ideas today could lead some to say you are delirious. And yet there were plenty of us then who believed in them, all over the world. At that time, I travelled a great deal, on several continents, and everywhere I went I would come across young people with the same dreams. This is what my friends and I were talking about in 1977. Not, certainly, about today’s worries, such as financial insecurity or the fear of not finding a job. We did not want a job: we wanted to be free from labour. If we want to recall something of those years, this is what I remember most vividly.

We lived in open houses. We slept here and there. We knew how dangerous heroin was, and anyone with an ounce of sense avoided it. But we also believed that marijuana and LSD were not harmful, and joints would be passed around as naturally as today we would offer and accept a glass of wine. LSD was something else: a transformative and significant experience, to be treated with caution and respect – but one from which we could learn a great deal. Our principal occupation, as with every youth, was to fall madly in love and to lose ourselves in passions. Sex was a kind of common currency, a way of encountering and getting to know others – men and women alike. It was taken seriously, regarded as the centre of life, almost like a religion. And just as every religion fills the lives of believers, we wanted to fill our lives with love and with lovemaking. As well as with friendship, music and the invention of new ways of being together that were different from the grey, competitive ones of other generations. We were experimenting with communal living, with the exclusion of jealousy, trying to really coexist. Of course there were arguments and fallings-out, as in any family; but the feeling of being part of a huge family that was scattered throughout the world was a deep-seated one: an enormous family that was moving together, like interplanetary explorers aspiring to create a new and different world. I have always thought that the Quakers in the first European communities in America, the apostles of Jesus in Palestine, the first Christians, the young Italians of the Risorgimento, the companions of Che Guevara in Bolivia, even Plato’s pupils in the Academy must have felt a little like we felt …

Yet we failed completely to build a new world. We were soon enough disillusioned. Some plans were abandoned because they were mistaken; many others because they were defeated. The plausibility of our aspirations melted like snow in sunlight. We went our separate ways, each one following their own path.

Was it futile to have dreamed at all? I don’t think so, for two reasons. The first is that for many of us those dreams fertilized the ground from which our lives grew. Some values from that time remained deeply rooted in us – and we were carried forward by those aspirations. The extreme form of freethinking cultivated in those years, whereby everything seemed possible and worth exploring, and every idea could be modified and adapted, provided for many of us the source for whatever it was that we went on to do with our lives.

I don’t know if the second reason is believable or not. But it exists all the same. Dreams of building a better world have frequently been defeated in the course of history, but they went underground and continued to be active there. And in the end, they contributed to real change. I still believe that this world, which seems ever more filled with war, violence, extreme social injustice and bigotry, with nationalistic, racial and regional groups attempting to wall themselves into their own narrow identities and to fight against each other, is not the only world possible. And in this, perhaps I am not alone.