The fight continues, also and especially in the kitchen.
Photo: Unsplash/Helen van I
They are done with butter and cheese. With tomato sauce, basilicumpesto, salsiccia or with zucchini from the allotment garden. It tastes like lunch and folk kitchen. And after summer and vacation. Some say pasta, the other noodles. With Sugo this means what is on the plate, pasta asciutta. On July 25th of each year it is more than just an Italian staple food – it becomes a culinary manifesto.
The tradition of the Pastasciutta Antifascista goes back to a moment of political euphoria: on July 25, 1943, Benito Mussolini was disempowered in Rome, arrested and put to the mountains on royal command. The news of the fall of the “Duc” spread like a running fire. Mussolini was not dead – a little later it was evacuated by German paratroopers and placed in northern Italy at the top of the fascist puppet republic of Salò. And yet Italian fascism had lost its face that day. In Gattatico, a rural community near Parma in the Emilia-Romagna, the Cervi family cooked pasta with butter and cheese for the entire village community on this day-there was a stage victory.
There were not only the pasta and the butter, but also the anti -fascist fighters from the Cervi family. Your stories became myth afterwards. Adelmo, the youngest child in the family, was seven months old when his father Aldo, together with his six brothers on December 28, 1943, was shot by fascist militia officers around half a year after the anti-fascist pasta meal. This had been the leader of the “Banda Cervi”, a resistance group from Gattatico that hid deserters, printed leaflets and supplied partisans.
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In the representation of Adelmo Cervi, July 25, 1943 was not a day of the jubilation, but one of the breath. Adelmo later wrote that at that moment the anti -fascist cohesion was strengthened – through what came on the table. He tirelessly keeps the memory of resistance awake. The story of his father and uncle did not transfigure Adelmo Cervi, but dissected literarily. “Seven men, seven lives, seven deaths,” he writes in his book “I Muei Sette Padri”. Those who lived on – including he and his aunts Diomira and Rina – had to see how. And eat what remains.
In Gattatico it was hot on Mussolini’s day. Alcide Cervi,
Genoeffa Cocconi and her children got from the storage camp, what else
There was: pasta, butter and cheese. They cooked in large pots, on an open flame. The fascists could take their lives, but not the pasta. Friends, neighbors, even some who had hesitated to open themselves against the regime gathered at the Cervis courtyard. It was a powerful gesture: we share what we have. We still live. And we provide resistance.
I ate my last anti -fascist spaghetti in Italy, and last year on the former prison island. It was a simple plate with tomato sauce on the Piazza del Castello. There, in the center of the former citadel, the sleeping facilities of the communists, anarchists and socialists banished by Mussolini, were located in the 1930s. During the day there was an obligation to work, the platform at night. The communists ate for themselves, as well as the socialists and the members of the group Giustizia e Libertà. The communist politicians Camilla Ravera, Altiero Spinelli, Umberto Terracini were among the prisoners and also Sandro Pertini. The latter later became mens leader of the socialists – and 1978 Italian president. A street on site is reminiscent of him. What came on the plate was not always much, but you shared what you had.
There were also political canteen for self -sufficiency on Ponza, another exertion island in the Tyrrhian Sea. A group of communists from Terlizzi in Puglia knew how to cultivate land and make a lot of much. It was a life in exile. “Abitare L’Uutopia” stands on a monument on the bank of the island. The utopia inhabit. This also includes: eating together.
The pasta kitchens of the Italian communists were not limited to the places of exile. In the cities, on the backyards of Rome, in the peripheral quarters of Milan or Bologna, the popular kitchens of the Partito Comunista d’Italia (PCD’i) were created in the twenties. Whoever came, got a plate – pasta with a little Sugo, sometimes just bread and a glass of water. That was enough. In some places, notes hung on the door: “Chi ha fame, entra” – if you are hungry, come in. A trowel against hunger. And a fork.
July 25th is a holiday of the Italian partisans.
Photo: ANPI
The KPÖ district organization in Vienna-Floridsdorf knows these stories. In the »Aquarium«, a project room in the car -free settlement, Cook a few of their members once a month pasta with tomato sauce and parmesan. No party session, but a dinner together – open to everyone who is hungry. Sometimes there is also pizza, communist pizza. The ingredients are the same as ever. And yet it’s about more: it’s about neighborhood and solidarity. To what you share. The political requirement: an energy circuit, a rental price brake, a price lid for food. People should take the trowel into their own hands.
The KPÖ plans to build on the tradition of the folk kitchens of the Comunista d’Italiia Partito and calls for space in public places. In April 2025, some of their members stopped with pizza trucks in different districts of Vienna – as a symbolic protest against the high food prices. Also in the “Laboratory Culture”, a cultural association in Vienna-Meidling, there is a meal together every year. The association, known for its interventions between allotment and social history, was founded in 1990 by ethnology students and is based in a allotment garden. There is discussion, eaten and played together.
Next Friday afternoon, club co -founder Ulli Fuchs will cook – for everyone who comes. Pasta. With butter. Or with zucchini. Definitely anti -fascist. On the table in the garden of the “everyday laboratory culture” there is a book next to the parmesan grip – just like every year on July 25th. Gernot Trausmuth, author from Vienna, turns into Adelmo Cervi’s book »My 7 fathers. As partisan against Hitler and Mussolini «read, he translated the work from Italian. The noodles are cooked, the cheese on the tomato sauce pulls threads. Fascism is not gone. But the kitchen remains. If you cook together, do not surrender.
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