Planning to eat pasta with friends this Saturday? Perfect timing. Tomorrow, 25 July, sharing a plate of pasta together is actually a way of remembering the fight against fascism.
Every year on that date, thousands of people across Italy sit down to eat pasta together and mark the fall of dictator Benito Mussolini. The tradition is called pastasciutta antifascista (antifascist pasta).
It goes back to 25 July 1943, the day Mussolini was arrested. Word reached the antifascist Cervi family made up of a father and seven sons, from the province of Reggio Emilia in northern Italy. As an act of spontaneous joy, so the story goes, they cooked more than 380 kg of dry pasta with butter and cheese, and handed it out for free in the village square.
The choice of dish was no accident. Nowadays, we know pasta as a symbol of Italian identity, but back then it was anything but universal. In the North, people mostly ate polenta. In the South, bread was the staple. Only in and around Naples did people eat dry pasta regularly, often in the street using their hands.
This started to change at the turn of the 20th century, when new machines made dry pasta easier to produce and ship. Italians needed no convincing: it was cheap, quick to cook, and of course very filling.
But the fascist regime hated dry pasta. Making it meant importing foreign wheat, and Mussolini wanted Italy to be self-sufficient. So in 1925, he taxed wheat imports and promoted rice instead, grown widely at home (notably for risotto). He even declared a “national rice day” on 1 November.
The Futurist Cookbook (a kind of culinary manifesto for fascism published in 1932) went even further, claiming pasta made Italians “heavy,” “brutish,” and “slow,” sapping the national spirit and making them less willing to go to war. The manifesto called for pasta to be abolished entirely.
For the Cervi family, serving up pasta was also an act of resistance. For decades, the story didn't travel very far, but it was kept alive by the Alcide Cervi institute, a research centre in the Cervi family's old farmhouse which is home to a museum and library on the antifascist Resistance.
The tradition has grown in recent years. “Now hundreds of towns organise their own pastasciutta antifascista on the same day,” a staff member from the institute told The European Correspondent. This year, over 370 events are officially registered with the institute, though many simply organise them without registering.
Organisers range from cultural centres, museums, and NGOs to citizens' groups, anti-fascist groups (notably ANPI, the Italian resistance veterans' association), political organisations, or just ordinary citizens who decide to throw a pasta event themselves.
A quick look at the list of events shows that formats vary. Sometimes there's a concert, sometimes a play, sometimes it's a film projection, sometimes an expert gives a talk on fascism. Most events are free or pay-what-you-like. Some do charge a fee, and the money is often donated to charity.
And of course, there's a lot of pasta. Last year, the flagship event at the Cervi farmhouse alone served 160 kg of pasta and 240 kg of gnocco fritto to 2,500 people. No need to follow the original recipe (cheese and butter); any sauce or pasta shape will do it. What really matters is getting people together around a table.
But pastasciutta antifascista is not just about the past. “The values behind it – freedom, justice, democracy, equality – are not settled once and for all. Each generation has to claim them again and again. Sitting at a table with strangers is a small thing, but it's a way of saying that those values are still ours,” the Cervi farmhouse staff member said.
Or you can just organise your own. “Anyone can do it, anywhere!” the staff member said. Just keep it free, and keep the spirit of the values behind it. And somewhere in the evening, tell the story of the Cervi family.
Because five months after that pasta was handed out in the village square, the seven Cervi brothers were shot by fascist forces. At the funeral, their father said: ”after one harvest comes another.”
“That's really what pastasciutta antifascista is about,” the staff member said. “Not commemorating a defeat, but continuing something.”