Rome mourns Emma Bonino as crowds gather ahead of state funeral
Hundreds of people queued outside Rome City Hall on Sunday to pay their last respects to Emma Bonino, the veteran Italian politician and human rights campaigner who died on Friday at the age of 78. Italy will hold a state funeral for her on Tuesday.
Bonino was a major political figure and rights campaigner in Italy for more than five decades. She rose to prominence in the 1970s as a leader of the Radical Party campaign to legalise abortion in deeply Roman Catholic Italy despite the Vatican's objections, and later built a wider public role in Italy and Europe.
A Carabinieri honour guard escorted Bonino's casket into City Hall. Riccardo Magi, secretary of Europa, the party Bonino founded in 2017, placed a European flag on it next to a photograph of Bonino wearing a black headscarf.
A woman carrying a sunflower was the first to enter. She placed the flower next to the coffin and stood aside as others walked past. Behind her was Rome-based artist Caterina Borelli, who said, "I think she was indomitable. She has been so important for all women and for the evolution of the feminist movement in Italy." Abortion was legalised in 1978, and many women on Sunday spoke of their appreciation for Bonino's role in that and other feminist struggles. "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 served as a European commissioner under then-prime minister Silvio Berlusconi and was a co-founder of the death penalty watchdog Hands Off Cain. In 2015, she announced that she had lung cancer and was undergoing chemotherapy, but said she did not plan to stop her political work. After treatment, she began wearing brightly coloured scarves on her head.
During her 50-year political career, Bonino was one of the few Italian leaders to make a mark both at home and internationally. As an EU commissioner, she helped shape the bloc's consumer protection policy and created the European Commission Humanitarian Office, now the European Union's main humanitarian arm. In that role, she travelled to war zones, including the former Yugoslavia, Rwanda, Sudan and Afghanistan, and argued that humanitarian aid could not be used as an excuse for the absence of political or military intervention.
Magi told reporters outside City Hall, "Emma loved the institutions, she loved democracy, and she dedicated her life to improving them." Explaining the European flag on her casket, he said that had been her top priority. "She wanted to profoundly reform Europe to make it federal, the United States of Europe," he said.
At the back of the line across the City Hall piazza, 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." Sunday's scenes in Rome underlined Bonino's long public life, from feminist and human rights campaigns to her work in Italian and European politics, ahead of her state funeral on Tuesday.
