“Imagine Sardinia as a fertile and rich field whose fecundity is fed by a subterranean spring of water welling up from a far off mountain. All of a sudden you see that the fertility of the field has disappeared. There were the abundant wheat stretched, there is only sun burnt grass. You look for the cause of this calamity, but you won’t ever find it, unless you search out of the boundary of your little field and extend your search up to the mountain from which the water sprang; unless you realize quite a lot of kilometres upstream a wicked or an egoist man obstructed the spring which fed the fertility of your field”

G. Fiori, Vita di Antonio Gramsci, Laterza, Roma-Bari 1995, p. 90, P. Togliatti et al., Gramsci, Einaudi, Torino 2001, p. 50.