Hundreds of people queued outside Rome’s city hall on Sunday to pay their last respects to Emma Bonino, the prominent Italian politician and human rights campaigner who died on Friday, aged 78.
A Carabinieri honor guard escorted the casket into the building, where Riccardo Magi, secretary of +Europa — the party Bonino founded in 2017 — placed a European flag on it next to a photo of an elegant Bonino wearing a black head scarf.
A woman carrying a sunflower was the first to enter. She carefully placed the flower next to the coffin before standing to the side as others filed past. Behind her was Caterina Borelli, an artist from Rome. “I think she was indomitable,” she said. “She has been so important for all women and for the evolution of the feminist movement in Italy.”
Bonino rose to political prominence in the 1970s as a leader of the Radical Party campaign to legalize abortion in a profoundly Roman Catholic Italy over the objections of the Vatican.
Abortion was legalized in 1978 and on Sunday many women expressed their appreciation for the politician's role in that and other feminist battles.
“Emma Bonino is important because she opened many doors. She was very courageous,” said Flavia D’Andrea Matteo, a psychoanalyst from Rome. “She was an example for all of us.”
Bonino was a key political figure and human rights campaigner in Italy for over five decades. She served as a European commissioner for then-Premier Silvio Berlusconi and was a co-founder of the death penalty watchdog Hands Off Cain.
In 2015, she announced that she was suffering from lung cancer and was being treated with chemotherapy but didn’t plan to stop her political activity. Following her treatment she began wearing brightly colored scarves on her head.
An explosive presence in politics during her 50-year-long career, Bonino was one of the few Italian political figures who scored important achievements both at home and internationally.
She won European exposure in a role as an EU Commissioner. She forged the EU’s consumer protection policy and created the European Commission Humanitarian Office, which is now the primary European humanitarian arm.
In that role she traveled to war zones — including visits to the former Yugoslavia, Rwanda, Sudan, and Afghanistan — and convinced Europe that humanitarian assistance couldn’t be an excuse for lack of political or military intervention.
“Emma loved the institutions, she loved democracy and she dedicated her life to improving them,” Magi told reporters outside city hall.
He said he put the European flag on her casket because that had been her top priority. “She wanted to profoundly reform Europe to make it federal, the United States of Europe,” he said.
Back at the end of the line snaking across the city hall piazza designed by Michelangelo all the way to the iconic she-wolf statue, Riccarda Meloni stood holding a red rose.
“Emma Bonino was a great friend of mine,” she said. “I worked with her in the '90s side-by-side in those extraordinary battles that now seem like science-fiction, very little money, so many ideals, so much desire to do good, to make the world a better place. That is what Emma Bonino was for me.”
Italy will hold a state funeral for Bonino on Tuesday.
