The preface of the old edition began with the phrase “this book is about illegality.” It was about at least ten different stories, taken from the reality of different periods of the Italian radical movement. Within the pages of the book, the experience of illegality and its importance as a choice, both existential and militant, was depicted, sometimes in a way that leaned towards emotion and sometimes towards political evaluation. The aim is to familiarize the reading public, as much as possible through the pages of a book, with this unfamiliar land of illegality and the people who have occasionally relocated to it.
We have enriched this publication with similar stories of our own domestic experience, which, although they have been more cumulative over the last 17 years, we must say that they extend through time and into the decades previous to post-independence. Reading different experiences from different kinetic environments in different times, we hope to reach, in the light of comparative study and critical observation, conclusions as to how close or far apart the thoughts and feelings of people who, although they never met, nevertheless found themselves in this same land, the land of fugitivity, can come together.
