Everyone agrees: there had never been anything like that decade, and those that followed could not have been without them.
The sixties, the first volume of an Italian history that will come down to the present day, still live on in nostalgia and myth: in the songs broadcast on the radio, in the closets or cellars where one cannot get rid of an eskimo or an old suede miniskirt, or in the drawers where telephone tokens, ten-lira coins, concert tickets, the provisional unlimited leave, covers of 45s and 78s reappear...
The vast majority of today's Italians were born after the war, all of us therefore, directly or from the stories of those who were there, know something of that "fabulous decade" that saw us walk together with Fellini, Visconti, Togliatti and Moro, Mina, Monica Vitti, Claudia Cardinale, Rita Pavone, Catherine Spaak; run together with Abebe Bikila and Gigi Riva, read together with Italo Calvino, Leonardo Sciascia, Natalia Ginzburg and Gabriel García Márquez.
While we were growing up, the champion Fausto Coppi, the good Pope Roncalli, U.S. President John Kennedy and his brother Bob died; people who would change Italy like utopian Adriano Olivetti and visionary industrialist Enrico Mattei. Also dead were Commander Guevara, Buddhist monks in Vietnam, Pastor Martin Luther King and Jan Palach, the boot-wearing priest Don Milani; others grew up unseen, the Buscettas, the Sindonas, "the palm line." They frightened us with the bomb and the wars, but boys and girls began to say "enough," the cinema and the music were ahead (and by a lot) of the old world that ruled us, made up of old generals, old politicians, old magistrates, old professors, old fascists who found, at the end of that fairy tale, a way to take revenge.
And they set off the Milan bomb, with which the sixties ended. And there was no more innocence.
And to say that, before, at least for a moment, all the future had seemed possible.