In Europe

and is probably in Angola at the moment. I'm able, however, to make an appointment with Fernando Rosas, currently professor of modern history, in those days a student and a favourite prey for the secret police. ‘I was fairly active in a Maoist cell, the MAPP,’ he tells me. ‘On two occasions I spent more than a year in jail, in 1971 they tortured me three times by making me go a week without sleep, and after that I went into hiding.’ I mention the fact that Western Europe's last three dictatorships all collapsed around 1975. He has an explanation for this: ‘Besides all their differences, the Spanish, Greek and Portuguese dictatorships had one thing in common: they wereall pronouncedly autocratic, they tried to survive without foreign “infection”, either economic or political. By the mid-1970s that had simply become impossible. The world became too intertwined.’
    On 25 April, 1974, friends woke him in the middle of the night: come listen to the radio, there's something going on. ‘Everyone knew the army was up to something. But no one knew when it was going to happen, or how, or by whom. So, for us, those first few hours were very tense: was this going to be an extreme right-wing coup, or a more progressive one? It was only around 11 a.m. that we started to realise who was who, the crowds began cheering for the rebel soldiers, the government troops stopped taking orders from their officers, after years of waiting it was no longer a matter of thinking, but of doing. And so, finally, we all ended up at Largo do Carmo.’ Was Rosas actually there, at that historic moment when the defeated Caetano handed over the reins? ‘No, of course not,’ he says, ‘I had to go, there were resolutions to write, standpoints to establish, meetings to attend!’
    To the north-east of Lisbon lies the province of Ribatejo. First you take the highway along the Tagus, then the traffic squeezes across an old bridge, and after that the road runs through endless forests of cork oak before coming to a huge plain with low sheds, the old walled haciendas of the former landowners, villages spread out around a petrol station, fields full of tomato plants. Beside the road lies a crumpled truck, atop the TV aerials the storks have built their nests, crop-dusters roar across the horizon.
    I am on my way to Couço, a two-hour drive from Lisbon, one of the many villages where farmers seized the estates in summer 1975 and began their own cooperatives. Many of those little local revolutions were never recorded, but the course of events in Couço was excellently documented by the Italian photographer Fausto Giaconne. His pictorial report begins in spring 1975, after Spínola's aborted coup, when the four local landowners fled to Brazil. On Saturday, 30 August, 1975, the general council of Couço met in the village cinema to start the actual expropriation. The next day, hundreds of poor farming families headed for the abandoned estates on tractors and gaily decorated hay wagons. They took with them hampers of wine, bread and home-made cheese, and bannerswaved along the dusty roads with slogans like ‘Only when the land belongs to those who work it will we have true socialism!’ and ‘Down with the exploitation of people by people!’ Giaconne's photographs show carts full of men and women singing, glowing faces and dancing children. Between 8 a.m. and midnight, 8,000 hectares of land were seized by one huge rolling people's celebration. Sol Posto, the home of one of the local landowners, was broken into: in the photos we see farmers’ wives admiring in amazement the softness of the beds, the pillows and the tablecloth. Nothing was to be taken, the army sealed off the house. It was, if Giaconne's pictures are anything to go by, the village feast of the century.
    ‘Look, that's me,’ says Joaquim Canejo, pointing to a photo that shows him talking to two women wearing traditional high hats. Now he is a quarter of a century older, he is missing one of his little fingers, and he and his son are sitting down to a huge plate of sausages and chops. Later he will go back to work behind the bar run by his son at the cooperative. Politically speaking, the red Portuguese revolution ended with the defeat of the left-wing radicals in November 1975, but most of the farming cooperatives were only dismantled in the course of the early 1980s. Today, father and son are the only ones left from the feast of 1975. Together they run the big hall at the