Maria Antonietta Macciocchi

Maria Antonietta Macciocchi (23 July 1922 – 15 April 2007) was an Italian journalist, writer, feminist and politician, elected to the Italian Parliament in 1968 as an Italian Communist Party candidate and to the European Parliament in 1979 as a candidate of the Radical Party.

Macciocchi was born in Isola del Liri, the child of anti-fascists. She joined the underground Italian Communist Party (PCI) during the German occupation of Rome. In 1950 she became editor of the party's women's magazine Vie Nuove. Then she edited a feminist magazine financed by the PCI, Noi donne. She joined l'Unità, the paper founded by Antonio Gramsci, becoming their foreign correspondent in Algiers and Paris. In the 1960s she lectured at Vincennes University France, and her book Pour Gramsci was credited with introducing Gramsci's thought to French intellectuals.

Returning to Italy in 1968 to stand in the general election as a candidate for Naples, she kept up a correspondence with Louis Althusser about both working-class conditions and local party management. Though elected, her publication of the correspondence helped to ensure that the PCI did not put her forward for re-election in 1972. She travelled to China for l'Unità, praising the Cultural Revolution in the resultant book, Dalla Cina: dopo la rivoluzione culturale. In 1977 she was expelled from the PCI for supporting Maoists in Bologna.

In 1979 she was elected Member of the European Parliament (MEP) for the Radical Party.

Macciocchi alternated work as an MEP to that of a journalist, writing for major newspapers such as Corriere della Sera, Le Monde and El Pais articles from the most diverse parts of the world, from Cambodia to Iran and Jerusalem. In 1992, the French President François Mitterrand awarded her the Legion of Honor. In the same year, she met Pope John Paul II and was fascinated by his charismatic personality. She wrote about the Pope in "Le donne secondo Wojtyla" (Women according to Wojtyla), an unexpected book that aroused more controversy for her "conversion" from admirer of Mao Zedong to admirer of the Pope.