The most recent sixty years of Italian history showcase many unusual features with regard to the development of the European Left. Italy's resistance movement was the most powerful and radical antifascist opposition west of a line from the Adriatic to the Baltic Sea. Its postwar Communist Party (PCI) was the largest organization of its kind west of the Iron Curtain. And, in Italy too, the social movements generated in the course of “1968” produced a far left which was far more socially implanted and long lasting than anywhere else. Small wonder, then, that it was Italian society that literally “produced” the most widely acclaimed left-wing theater director, playwright, and actor in all of postwar Europe: Dario Fo.