Some 17 years ago Eluana Englaro was a pretty, wild-haired 21-year-old with an unmapped life ahead of her. Today the former language student lies, eyes open but unseeing, in a persistent vegetative state in a hospital bed while the whole of Italy argues over her fate.
To live to see the death of your child is perhaps the most terrible thing that can happen to anyone, but Beppino Englaro has fought against Italy's most senior politicians and the Catholic church for more than a decade to allow his only child to pass away in dignity. This weekend that process has finally begun; Eluana's feeding tubes were removed by her doctors on Friday morning. But it could take up to three weeks for Eluana to die, and the legal wrangling is far from over. Italy's prime minister, Silvio Berlusconi, is threatening to pitch his country into a constitutional crisis by pushing through a decree that would see Eluana's sedation stopped and the tubes reconnected. The country's president, Giorgio Napolitano, has refused to sign it. The Vatican has made its implacable opposition to Beppino Englaro's wishes clear.
Haggard and exhausted, Englaro calls the last-minute political intervention "an inconceivable violence".
It was in the early hours of Saturday, 18 January 1992, as Eluana was driving back from a party at a friend's house, that she lost control of her father's car on an icy road. It smashed into a lamp-post. Eluana was rushed to the nearest hospital, in Lecco, northern Italy, but slipped into a coma, and scans revealed a devastating degree of brain damage.
After four weeks, doctors deemed her to be in a persistent vegetative state. After a year, the young woman, "a sunny personality; extremely popular, opinionated from a young age and very proud" was declared to be in a permanent vegetative state. Since then, breathing independently, she has aged in hospital beds, fed and hydrated by tubes.
Eluana's plight has become a landmark right-to-die case, shining an uncomfortably bright light on two different Italys: the liberal and secular and the conservative, influenced by the Vatican, in which government ministers refuse to respect even supreme court rulings on matters of conscience.
Eluana's 67-year-old father is a small, slightly-built man. The long battle has taken a toll. Englaro's eyes are often fixed on the distance and he is never far from anger. More than a decade of campaigning has left him with the politician's trick of turning any question into a means of expounding his own message.
The family home, a modern apartment in Lecco by the side of Lake Como, is dominated by a large sitting room with a glorious view of snow-covered mountains on the far shore. The room itself has none of the usual clutter or ornamentation of a home, just a few stacks of bound, yellowing newspapers by the fireplace and a cabinet covered with pictures of Eluana, a raven-haired young woman with her mother's classic Italian looks.
Her father spreads out a further selection of photographs of his smiling daughter on a glass coffee table as he explains to the Observer why he wants her to be allowed to die.
He wants the release of three people from their own purgatories: Eluana, himself and his wife, Saturna. Mrs Englaro, who is now suffering from cancer, is rarely seen or heard in the campaign to "free" her daughter, although her husband says she is wholeheartedly behind it. "She was completely destroyed by what happened to Eluana. She doesn't want to talk to anyone about it."
Mother and daughter were extremely close. Saturna often looked after Eluana alone when her husband had to travel for work.
"Do you understand that concept of needing to be free? Do you?" says Englaro. "Because it's what this is all about. It's in the blood and the DNA of this family. I know what Eluana would have wanted in this situation because she's already told us."
A year and a day before her own accident, a friend of Eluana called Alessandro crashed his motorbike, suffering serious brain damage. In great distress, Eluana told her father: "If something like that ever happened to me, you have to do something. If I can't be what I am now, I'd prefer to be left to die. I don't want to be resuscitated and left in a condition like that."
Alessandro remained severely incapacitated and died 10 years later. Others who knew Eluana have confirmed the sentiment. Her younger cousin Germana, who adored Eluana, would also write to the courts, in March 2003, calling for her cousin "with the marvellous smile" to be allowed to die. "This voice asks for her to be released," she wrote.
Eluana's three best friends, Laura, Francesca and Cristina, reacted in different ways to the tragedy. In the first months Cristina went to visit her frequently, spending hours talking to her unresponsive friend, although she found it "intensely painful".
Francesca saw Eluana once after the accident and refused to visit again. Many years later, in 2006, when her testimony regarding Eluana's wishes was requested for an important court hearing, she gave it promptly.
Laura did, too: "I wanted Eluana back, not for her to die, but when, after the prognosis said her state was permanent and her condition was judged irreversible, without hope, my desire to see Eluana's wishes and not my own prevailed," she said.
All three, then, testified that Eluana had said that in the event of such a tragedy that is what she would want to happen.
Such testimonies have been key to Englaro's legal battle. Another is the assertion that nutrition and hydration for people in PVS can be considered artificial medical treatments that are not in the patient's best interest - a decision the House of Lords arrived at more than 15 years ago in the case of Hillsborough victim Tony Bland, who was allowed to die in 1993.
Englaro began his fight in the local courts in Lecco five years after Eluana's accident. It had seemed to have concluded last November, when Italy's highest court, the court of cassation, decreed that feeding could be stopped.
The Vatican, fearing Italy was moving towards legalised euthanasia, took an increasingly vocal interest as the publicity around the case grew. The Vatican's spokesman on health issues, Cardinal Javier Lozano Barragán, said removal of feeding tubes amounted to "monstrous and inhuman murder". Avvenire, the church's daily newspaper, accused Italy's highest court of "necrophilia".
But such outbursts have backfired, adding to the impression among ordinary Italians of a church becoming increasingly out of touch. A poll in January of more than 1,000 readers of La Stampa newspaper found that 85% thought Eluana should be allowed to die. But in November, as Englaro was arranging for his daughter to be transferred to a clinic in his native Udine, which had offered to help Eluana die, another setback emerged. Astonishingly, at least for foreign observers, Italy's conservative welfare minister Maurizio Sacconi, "following his conscience", stepped in and threatened any clinic that helped Eluana to die with financial ruin, or in his words "unimaginable consequences". Mercedes Bresso, governor of nearby Piedmont, said the case had "become unbearable for a civilised country, from a legal and human point of view".
But in Italy rules are made to be broken - or ignored. Berlusconi has led by example, having introduced a handy new immunity law to extricate himself from ominous corruption charges. Opponents of Eluana's right to die are making noises about new legislation that would outlaw the withholding of treatment. "This is not a particularly civil country, nor a democratic one," says Englaro. "That is the real tragedy of this family. For 17 years nobody has listened to us. To me or to Eluana. It's black or white. If she couldn't be what she was then, she would not have wanted to live."
Englaro has written a book, Eluana: La Libertà e La Vita, in which he attacks doctors for aggressively treating his daughter for the first month after her accident, a period when theoretically they might have salvaged some degree of awareness from her crushed brain. These are "institutional criminals" for resuscitating people to effectively create "the artificial condition" of a vegetative state. Better for Eluana had they not intervened at all, he believes.
Englaro is not a religious man. "If there is a God, I don't need an intermediary such as the church to speak for me," he says. His greatest anger is not reserved for the Vatican, which "in a free country has a right to its opinions", but for politicians and doctors.
While Italy's medical community is split over Eluana's case, the prognosis is not in doubt. Occasionally signs of consciousness are seen in vegetative patients within the first two years of the condition's onset. But, as time goes by, the chances of recovery become ever more slim. After so many years the hope that Eluana will emerge from her coma is not raised by even those politicians and church figures who most fiercely oppose her right to die.
It is only natural to wonder what Eluana looks like now. Englaro's pictures of Eluana as a pretty teenager might not be helping his cause. By only allowing people to see Eluana as she was, he is maintaining the idea of the princess in the fairytale, waiting for the right moment to reawaken. But taking a photo of the 38-year-old Eluana is dismissed out of hand. "No, there's a limit," he says. "There are some things you don't transgress."
He does not go to see his daughter that often, he says. Anyway, visits are an "invasion" because she would not have wanted to be seen like that. And when he does go: "I see a person who has suffered the worst sort of violation that anyone could ever suffer."
It seems that Eluana may soon die at La Quiete in Udine - a private institution that is not at the mercy of Sacconi, or state funding - where the senior anaesthetist, Dr Amato de Monte, will aid her death. "I'm not an executioner," he said. "Eluana died 17 years ago." Even hospitals which refused to take on Eluana cannot conceal their sympathy. Giuseppe Galanzino, director of Turin's Molinette hospital, said: "If I was Eluana's father, I'd have died from a broken heart by now."
Englaro says he wants his daughter to be free to pass away before he does, but he remains constantly wary of last-minute reprieves. "This is Italy: let's wait and see what finally happens."
It would certainly be the end of something that has dominated his life for more than a decade: "This is everything. I think about it every moment of the day. People might say I'm obsessed; I don't care. I'll continue until it's done."
Eluana's body would be cremated and go to the family tomb in Udine. But how will he feel after all this time, when Eluana finally dies? "I really don't know," he says quietly. Looking into the distance, he repeats: "I don't know how I'll feel."
On Friday morning doctors in the La Quiete clinic began reducing the amount of food in Eluana Englaro's feeding tube, according to a precise medical protocol that will see nutrition gradually replaced with sedative drugs. But even then, Berlusconi was having telephone exchanges with a senior Vatican figure, Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, who implored the prime minister to intervene with a ministerial decree to prevent her death. "We have to stop this crime against humanity," he told Berlusconi.
However, head of state Giorgio Napolitano refused late on Friday to sign such a decree. Politically the centre-left, headed by opposition leader Walter Veltroni, has demanded that the wishes of the family - and Italy's highest court - be respected. Even some of Berlusconi's political allies, including the environment minister, Stefania Prestigiacomo, and the president of the lower house of parliament, Gianfranco Fini, have backed the court of cassation ruling, although Sacconi was yesterday still seeking legal loopholes that might allow him to declare the hospital's activity illegal. Rarely has the fate of one person so clearly exposed the faultlines that run through Italian society, with politicians, campaigners and the church battling for the country's soul.
Englaro does not want his broken family to become an example for the dozens of other families who are probably in a similar position: "If they don't overcome their problem, it's because they don't care or aren't trying hard enough. I don't want to be a spokesman for anyone."
