There is also a more specific reason why pasta mattered. Today pasta is treated as the most obvious symbol of Italian identity. But this was not always the case. Before the industrialization of food production after World War II, pasta was not consumed everywhere in Italy in the same way. In much of the North, polenta remained central; in the South, bread was often more important.

Fascism had an ambivalent, and often hostile, relationship to pasta. In the context of autarky, the regime wanted to reduce dependence on imported wheat. The fascist ideal of the “new Italian” was disciplined, rural, virile, and militarized. Pasta, especially in futurist rhetoric, was attacked as heavy, softening, sleep-inducing; an anti-modern food that supposedly weakened the national spirit. Filippo Tommaso Marinetti’s polemic against pasta expressed something real about fascism’s desire to regulate bodies, tastes, habits and everyday life.

In that context, a public distribution of pasta was, more than a meal, a challenge to fascist discipline. It was an action by civil society against the state’s attempt to control everyday life. It was a political gift, a way of saying: we are still here; we can still gather together; we can still share; we can still imagine life after fascism.

In Emilia-Romagna, pasta carried a different, quietly subversive significance. In many socialist families, cappelletti in brodo, traditionally eaten on May 1, became a symbol of community and political belonging. Cappelletti was never outlawed. Rather, what the fascist regime abolished in 1923 was May Day, erasing the workers’ holiday and suppressing its rituals. Yet the tradition endured behind closed doors: preparing and sharing cappelletti on May 1 became a subtle act of resistance, a way to keep alive a memory the regime sought to extinguish. In my family in Carpi, in the province of Modena, we have continued to eat cappelletti in brodo every May 1 ever since.

After the war, in the newly founded Italian Republic, the memory of the Cervi family did not remain politically neutral. The Partito Comunista Italiano (PCI) turned the seven brothers into one of the great popular myths of the Resistance. If Antonio Gramsci became, in some ways, the foremost intellectual legend of Italian and global antifascism, the Cervis became one of its popular myths: peasants, martyrs, brothers, sons of the people.

For many years, the Cervis’ pasta remained primarily a local memory, in Reggio Emilia. It was only after the Cold War that it began to be revived as a broader antifascist celebration. In 1988, volunteers at the Museo Casa Cervi in Gattatico, a museum since 1974, organized a new Pastasciutta Antifascista, serving plates of pasta on July 25. From the mid-1990s onward, it became a regular event.

Today it takes place in many towns across Italy and abroad. It is present wherever Italian antifascist memory travels with migrants, associations, students, workers, political communities, and even university lecturers like me, in London organizing a plate of pasta and a glass of Lambrusco to talk a little about history and memory. In this sense, the pastasciutta has become a transnational antifascist ritual.

But what does it mean to celebrate antifascist pasta today?

Memory matters and is a part of civic life. But history is something more. To think historically means asking about causes, transformations, institutions, class relations, political languages, cultural hierarchies, and forms of domination. If memory can preserve, history must also unsettle. Memory says: do not forget. History asks: How was that possible, why did it happen, what has changed, and what has not?

That distinction is important because the question of fascism is today often badly posed. If memory is detached from history, antifascism can become merely ritual. Today antifascism can seem “cool” again. The symbols circulate easily: songs, slogans, T-shirts, posters, social media posts, red scarves, vintage graphics, partisan aesthetics. This isn’t a bad thing. Political cultures need their rituals and pathos. But there is also a risk of using antifascist symbols as a moral decoration, emptied of their context and political substance. There’s a risk that antifascism becomes a mere brand, reduced to a lifestyle or a gesture of cultural distinction rather than something really practiced.

One of the sharpest definitions of fascism was given by Vittorio Foa, a socialist partisan who became a member of parliament in Italy’s postwar republic. Responding to a senator elected for the postfascist Movimento Sociale Italiano, Foa replied: “If you had won, I would be in prison. Since we won, you are a senator.” He suggested that antifascism is not the suppression of disagreement but the condition that makes democratic disagreement possible.

There is, of course, still a nostalgic fascism, especially in Italy: pilgrimages to Mussolini’s hometown of Predappio, Roman salutes, Fascist memorabilia, and the grotesque cult of the Duce.

Yet the more serious danger lies in the hollowing out of democracy, the erosion of rights, the normalization of political violence, and the return of political languages that turn social problems into enemies to be expelled. This does not always look like fascism; it may operate within the formal boundaries of liberal democracy. It may speak the language of security, tradition, nation, religion, the natural family, or common sense. It may not present itself as dictatorship; it may present itself as “the people” against its enemies, be they migrants, artists, feminists, workers, intellectuals, judges, the LGBTQ movement, or journalists.

The real threat is not that fascism is returning. Rather, today the danger is that fascism is dehistoricized, turned into one opinion among others, one side of an allegedly eternal fracture in the national story. Too often, Fascism is presented not as a regime with its causes, institutions, violence, class alliances, colonial wars, and racial laws but a temperamental expression of “Italian culture.” Fascism becomes one more story in the national photo album, one more supposed identity available for political performance.

The Pastasciutta Antifascista resists this. It asks us to make history public again, to bring people together not only to celebrate but also to discuss, argue, understand, and organize. The point is not nostalgia for the Resistance of World War II but to recover the popular, material, and collective dimension of antifascism.

Obviously, a plate of overcooked pasta did not defeat fascism. But it announced, publicly and collectively, that fascism could be defeated. It turned the end of a regime — or what people hoped was the end — into a shared act of liberation.

For this reason, the Pastasciutta Antifascista still matters. We need occasions to think historically together. To remember the Cervi is not only to say that they were killed by fascists. It is to ask what kind of world made fascism possible, what forms of solidarity made resistance possible, and what forms of indifference might make authoritarianism possible again.

Antifascism, after all, is not only the memory of those who died. It is something practiced by those who live.