NPR's Sylvia Poggioli reports from Rome that L'Unita, the official mouthpiece of the Italian communist party, folded this month amid dwindling sales and mounting debt. At the end of the Cold War, the Italian Communist party changed its name, but even so the Italian left lost its political clout. With the closing of L'Unita, Italy has lost a cultural institution that for decades featured the writings of leading western intellectuals, as well as East European dissidents.
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