INTRODUCTORY NOTE

(Lorenza Ponzone, IL PARTITO RADICALE NELLA POLITICA ITALIANA, 1962-1989, Schena editore, January 1993)

Carrying out a documentary research on the first years of life of the new radical party - the sixties - is an arduous task. There is very little written matter produced by the new party, and at any rate, during the many months in which we worked at verifying the sources there was no classification or at least an order of what has been published by and on the radical party. One example: a systematic collection of the papers of the thirty-five congresses, from the party's refounding to 1989, has never been made. As a consequence, we have had to reconstruct them by assembling material from newspapers or private collections.

We have necessarily been forced to draw from not entirely dependable, albeit verified sources, represented by the newspapers published by the party. Thankfully, these are to be found in the private collection of a radical from Parma, Davide Ciaccia, and in the collections of the national libraries of Florence and Rome. We also examined the prints and the sporadic booklets owned by private persons or kept in the radical party's archive in Florence. The latter is a local organization which possesses interesting material albeit with many gaps. However it is kept in a systematic order.

The national direction of the radical party has recently given a helping hand to all researchers by creating an electronic archive in Rome, which contains the articles published on "Radical News" since 1986 and the resolutions of the thirty-five congresses. Moreover, the reference files of the activities of the radical parliamentary group have been rearranged, and the articles and documents which have already been published have been classified.

The researches relative to the history of the first period of the party are the ones that present the greatest difficulties. The first steps of the protagonists do not emerge clearly from the few printed documents which are often incomplete or badly kept. The only sources are oral ones, collected a posteriori and not verifiable. Therefore, if this work presents contradictions, gaps and a few incongruities, this is also due to the poor quality of the sources we have drawn from in the absence of more reliable ones.

A few remarks on the chronological order chosen. It is accompanied by an exposition by problems, such as that of divorce (chapt. II), of the referenda, of the structure of the party (chapt. III), of abortion. Therefore, the chronological order corresponds to the various stages of the most important moments. The plan of this study closes with the Budapest congress, a crucial event which may be considered the final act of the national party. After Budapest the radical party becomes a different party, a transnational party which is no longer bound to the destiny of a single country.

L.P.