Achille Occhetto returns to Bolognina, to the places of the 'turning point' of 12 November 1989

It was a Sunday, Sunday 12 November 1989: exactly 37 years after that historic day, Achille Occhetto returns to Bologna to the places of the so-called 'Bolognina turning point' with which he closed the experience of the Communist Party, giving life to the PDS.

The last national secretary of the PCI, the protagonist of that epochal change in Italian politics, will speak at the meeting entitled "The left to the test of the present. History, identity and new challenges of democracy", scheduled for the afternoon in the Sala Fondazione Duemila-Circolo Pd Bolognina in Piazza dell'Unità.

Today's Bolognina

In Bolognina there is no longer anything that recalls the 'Turn', that is, the transformation, starting with the change of name, of the Italian Communist Party announced by the secretary Achille Occhetto in 1989, a few days after the fall of the Berlin Wall.

The plaque, erected on the twentieth anniversary, in the presence of the leaders of the Democratic Party, was replaced with another commemorating the fallen of the partisan battle of Bolognina, to which the turning point of '89 is deeply linked.

Bologna is a city that tenaciously cultivates the memory of the often tragic events that have marked its recent history. This passage, however, the one that put an end to the largest Communist party in Western Europe, is too complicated a memory: many have made it known that they do not like it, some in a civil manner, fueling a lively discussion especially within the ANPI, others with acts of vandalism: the tombstone, in fact, was destroyed with a hammer or defaced several times. And so it was that, in recent years, the tombstone was silently made to disappear. His inscription remembered and linked the history of the 'turning point' with that of the partisan struggle: Occhetto, in fact, foreshadowed the change of name of the Communist Party when speaking with the partisans, on the occasion of the commemoration of the 45th anniversary of the battle of Bolognina.

Two facts, in fact, closely linked, even in the coincidence of anniversaries. Today Bolognina, a neighborhood on the very outskirts, immediately behind the central station, is a multi-ethnic neighbourhood, but also one in rapid transformation and in great turmoil. In the neighborhood hall where Occhetto uttered those fateful words, there is now a Chinese hairdresser.

The appointment

The event, the organizers explain, will be an opportunity to present Achille Occhetto's latest essay, 'Beyond the Abyss. Rethinking the left and democracy', published by Passigli Editori, published on the occasion of his ninetieth birthday.

Alongside Occhetto there will be Walter Dondi, at the time a journalist for l'Unità who asked Occhetto the question about the possible change of name of the PCI and who retraced that event in his book 'The Last Sunday of the PCI', published by Bibliotheka Edizioni.

The meeting includes, among others, the interventions of Occhetto and Dondi and those of Annalisa Corrado of the national secretariat of the EP and MEP (in video) and of Enrico Di Stasi, provincial secretary of the Bologna PD.