Il desiderio di essere come tutti

Francesco Piccolo’s book interweaves the narrator’s emotional and political education with the history of Italy from the 1970s to the early 2000s. It is in two parts, ’The pure life: Berlinguer and me’ and ’The impure life: Berlusconi and me’. The passage from one to the other traces the gradual abandonment of an ideal of absolute consistency and the acceptance of the contradictions and compromises that run through both individual and collective life.