ABSTRACT
Oral testimony has been amply discussed as a source of information on the events of history. This chapter discusses an ‘imaginary’, ‘wrong’, ‘hypothetical’ motif which is found in working-class narratives in several different parts of Italy but focusing mostly on its occurrences in a specific group, the old-time Communist working-class activists and cadre of the naval steelworks town of Terni, the oldest industrial town in central Italy. The working-class imagination embodied in the testimony must therefore be placed in the context of the party’s policies and of the official explanations of their historical background and precedents. Stories about the 1920s explain the missing revolution by lack of leadership, thus blaming the Socialists, from whom the Communist Party split in 1921. In uchronic tales the leadership plays a role similar to that of mediators in Levi-Strauss’ structural interpretation of myths: two-faced creatures that hold together conflicting but equally necessary presuppositions.
