Stefania Voli’s book is a revision of her PhD thesis, defended at the University of Naples ‘L’Orientale’ in 2010. It is essentially a history of the ‘long Italian Sessantotto’ and, specifically, an oral history of the extra-parliamentary left organisation Lotta Continua told through a corpus of 24 interviews conducted by the author. The subjects of the interviews were male and female ex-militants who – during the 1970s – were active in Turin, one of the most important industrial hubs in Northern Italy.

The book consists of five chapters. The first one, ‘Torino, la Fiat, l’università. E poi Lotta continua’, focuses on Turin, where Lotta Continua was founded and where the interviewees created a network of identities and relationships. By investigating the case study of the Lotta Continua community in Turin, a deeply anti-fascist city, Voli is able to link the student movement of Sessantotto to the various strikes of the ‘hot autumn’ (1969–1970), thereby calling into question the social, cultural, and generational boundaries that had shaped the urban context. Symbolically, the ten-year series of social conflicts arose in Turin, before spreading throughout Italy.

These reflections on redrawing geographical and social boundaries through political activism continue in the second chapter, ‘Fratture, innovazioni’, where Voli explores the legacy of her interviewees’ activism in both the political and personal spheres, extracting from their memories a confused sense of renewal and continuity.

While these opening chapters focus on Lotta Continua’s early history and, in particular, on the political and social patterns and structures created through the participants’ personal and political experiences, the next chapters explore two crucial issues in the history of Italy in the 1970s: the memory of political violence and the role of feminism.

Starting with the Piazza Fontana bombing, in the third chapter, ‘I generi della violenza’, Voli analyses the relationship between political violence and memory. Given the fact that in oral history how things are told is at least as important as what is told, the focus is on the resistance and on the narration of violence as a political practice, underlining the central role of this category in current public debates on the 1970s in Italy. Even though hesitations and pauses characterise all the interviews, Voli argues that her subjects are using a specific female language to explain, rationalise and describe the use of force during their years of militancy. In fact, this gendered interpretation shows that the males think about (and justify) violence as a plural and collective category, while female experiences are told through the description of a specific, singular and personal conception of the resort to violence, underlining its impact on their own personal and political paths. Consequently, this chapter demonstrates that – despite the enduring social imagery of women’s peaceful and non-violent nature – female memories are neither uniform nor obvious. By contrast, female life stories become a mirror of the unresolved, unfinished and conflicting role of violence within the public dimension of memory. This is the case not only because of the persistence of a collective gender consciousness that assigns gender roles; but also because of a lack of reference points within the public narrative of the Italian Resistance movement, in which the public debate has obscured armed female participation. In Voli’s opinion, the recollection of female activism runs aground on the same point that has characterised the acknowledgment of female participation in the Resistance (‘the just war’ par excellence, to which extra-parliamentary left organisations were ideologically connected).

The fourth chapter, ‘Strabismi della memoria. Militanti all’incrocio tra organizzazione e femminismo’, examines female relationships within the organisation – often untouched by any displays of sisterhood – to underscore the effects of the deeply masculine and chauvinistic political imaginaries (which were typical of working-class culture) on female behaviours. In this context, the feminist movement’s role was crucial because its success marked a turning point in the story of Lotta Continua and, in general, of the New Left parties whose traditional approach to the so-called questione femminile often caused women’s defection. Voli finds that men cannot reach a common explanation of the impact of the feminist movement on their lives. Forty years later, the first young men who had to confront feminist practices and theories seem to have become tongue-tied by the impact of feminism on the private and public spheres.

Paying great attention to the gender point of view and female activism, Voli’s research provides an important contribution to the study of the relations between feminist movements and New Left organisations, a research field relatively unexplored by Italian historiography.

One last aspect requires elucidation: the historiographical context of this project. Given Voli’s aim of showing the intersections between subjective experiences and collective historical events, this study links to a rich tradition of oral history research on the series of social conflicts that began in 1968. Although a methodological introduction would have enriched the study, this oral history confirms the importance of life stories for historical research on Sessantotto (well-defined as a time of ‘collective capture of speech’). From this perspective, the preface by Luisa Passerini (author of the classic oral history Autobiography of a Generation) imbues Voli’s book with a symbolic meaning. In her seminal study, aware of the connection between the protagonists’ memories and her own subjectivity (as witness and oral history researcher), Passerini highlighted the effect of her sense of belonging to the events of her research and launched a reflection on different generational approaches to the past. Stefania Voli is also, as a historian in her thirties, challenging the ‘possessive memories’ of the Italian 1970s by adopting a generational approach that is able to elucidate the ‘1968 years’ from a new point of view. The outcome of her research path proves that – quoting Alessandro Portelli – ‘it is the common background that makes a dialogue possible, but it is the difference which makes it meaningful’ (p. 160).