How many are massed in the heart of Rome on this torrid late summer day? Five hundred thousand, as the official figures say? A million, or even more, as the claim The Unita, the daily newspaper of the Italian Communist Party (PCI), in its special edition? There, in this August 25, 1964, the militants and the communist voters. But it is also an entire people who have come to pay a final tribute to Palmiro Togliatti, the man who built the most important communist party in the Western world and led it for decades.
Palmiro Togliatti had been struck down four days earlier by a stroke while on family vacation in Yalta, Crimea: there he was to meet the Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev, who had “invited” him to explain himself on positions deemed too singular. Relations with the big sister party had not always been easy, but comrade “Ercoli”, his pseudonym in the Comintern (the Communist International) and during the war in Spain, was respected in Moscow. Notably because the PCI already had some 2 million members after the war.
“Above all, I wanted to make people feel the pain of people who had come from all over the Peninsula, but also from all over Europe, including many Italian migrant workers. » Mario Carnicelli
Thus, even if the company Italians displayed a certain independence bordering on heresy, the outcasts and backbenchers of world communism came for the funeral, starting with Leonid Brezhnev, who would later become General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union . Only the Chinese and the Albanians are missing, in open rupture with the Soviet “revisionists”.
“More than photographing the many intellectuals and artists, the government officials and the leaders of communism, I wanted above all to make the pain of the people who had come from all over the Peninsula, but also from all over Europe, including many Italian migrant workers, says Mario Carnicelli, who had been commissioned by the communist federation of Pistoia, in Tuscany, to photograph the ceremony. So as a young man, he had taken his Hasselblad, a large 6 × 6 square format, well decided “to exalt a hope rather than a moment of mourning”.
“I was struck by the intensity of the crowd’s silence and by its contemplation. People were there with their families, with the beautiful clothes, those of Sunday and ceremonies. They wore the red headscarf but also made the sign of the cross,” says the 84-year-old photographer, winner of the first edition of the Viviane Esders Award, which honors the work of an independent photographer over 60 who is still active. The arrival of widows and children of Italian miners killed eight years earlier in the Marcinelle mine accident in Belgium, which killed 262 people, particularly moved the photographer.
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