In September 1985 the news broke of the case of the Bulgarian couple, Sveja and Mikhail Filipov. Dissidents, submitted in their own country to a series of episodes of discrimination. Two years before, during a journey in neighbouring Turkey, they had asked for political asylum, thus starting the necessary procedure to reunite their family. It was not possible for them to bring their small children Micaela and Severina with them, who since then had been entrusted to their maternal grandparents. The Bulgarian Government, however, refused to allow the expatriation of the little girls, and after renewing their request, several times, the Filipov couple - who had in the meantime gone to Italy and were waiting to be able to emigrate to a definitive destination in some country, decided to make this ordeal public. The Filipov case was adopted by the Radical Party, and there was a spate of initiatives starting with the hunger strike of the Bulgarian couple, who continued their strike for fourty days, until they heard

the news, from the Bulgarian consul in Italy,that their case had been solved. But after this announcement nothing followed. For months, the Radical Party kept attention on the case alive, also asking for the intervention of the Italian Minister of Foreign Affairs. At the beginning of February 1987, the Filipovs announced their intention of a second hunger strike, in Chianciano, during the Federal Council of the Radical Party, but this time they undertook it together with a great number of militant Radicals. That was not all: in Trieste fifty-five people went on a 24-hour hunger strike, including the director of the astronomical observatory, Margherita Hack, and professor Rotelli, one of the founders of New Psychiatry. In Milan even Enzo Tortora, who was at that time under house arrest, participated in the hunger strike. A complete list of all the participants would be very lenghty. On the crest of this mobilisation, and thanks not least to the personal intervention of Andreotti, Minister of Foreign Affairs,

the decisive moment was reached on February 17: the Bulgarian Government gave permission to Antonio Stango and Luigi del Gatto as a doctor, to go to Bulgaria with a legal proxy on behalf of the Filipovs, to fetch the children, together with their paternal grandmother, the elderly Mrs. Maria Kirova.