Word: sassari
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Sassari (pop. 100,000), where Berlinguer grew up, one of his teachers recalls that "he was a very mediocre student, but he had a good mind." The young Enrico was a voracious reader who spent much time in his Uncle Ettorino's library; it was there that, among other things, he discovered Karl Marx. His family also had a radical tradition; the Berlinguers, like many other Sardinian landowners, had been squeezed by industrialization and became ardent progressives as a result. Continuing the tradition, Enrico and Younger Brother Giovanni, now 51 and a Communist Deputy, haunted a Sassari cafe favored...
During World War II the young Berlinguer became the secretary of Sassari's Young Communist League, was arrested for taking part in food riots and freed after a hundred days in jail. He soon moved to Rome to work in the party's headquarters there and became a protégé of Togliatti. By the age of 23, Berlinguer had won a seat on the party's central committee and been tabbed as a comer; after that, he gradually worked his way to the top until he succeeded Togliatti's successor, the aging...