A hundred years since the Italian Communist Party (PCI) was founded, its birth remains controversial. In recent months, a torrent of books and articles have damned this “original sin” — accusing the Communists of splitting the Left in the face of fascism and halting the advance of the reformist left.

It’s easy to understand why the PCI still casts a shadow over Italian politics. The leading force in the World War II–era resistance, it became the West’s largest Communist Party, by the 1950s boasting some two million members. It remained the main opposition party until its demise in 1991, and former members continue to play a prominent role in the “center-left,” even as most of them turned toward liberalized social democracy.

Given such changes, the revolutionary assumptions on which the PCI was originally based are widely scorned. Massimo D’Alema, Italy’s first ex-Communist prime minister, this week claimed that the PCI was “always a reformist party.” He voiced a common center-left stance dismissing the party’s 1921 split from the Socialists as a mistake, while venerating subsequent leaders like Antonio Gramsci as reformist “democrats.”