‘Are you calling me a fascist?’ A Contribution to the Oral History of the 1968 Italian Student Rebellion

Abstract

This article contributes to the historiography of the student upheavals during the late 1960s by offering insights from those outside the student movement. Using oral history methods, it explores the reactions to the student activists in Italy. These oral recollections reveal not only important differences in the ways in which the older generation experienced and remembered the years of student protest, but also the different strategies adopted by mothers and fathers to deal with their activist offspring. By looking across the barricades in Italy, this article shows that any understanding of the student rebellion of 1968 must be grounded within a national historical context. It also answers the call for a wider use of oral history sources for studies in contemporary European history.