Dante’s Beach, Ravenna
On the final day of their state visit to Italy the King and Queen were in Ravenna to mark the 80th anniversary of the liberation of the area in 1945 by the British Eighth Army.
What they probably did not realise is that Ravenna is a left-wing stronghold in a region – the Romagna – which was the birthplace of Italian revolutionary socialism at the end of the 19th century. Mussolini, a revolutionary socialist before he invented fascism, was born elsewhere in the region.
From 1945, Ravenna, like everywhere else in red Romagna, was run by the Italian communist party – the PCI – until the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and is still run by their direct descendants. The PCI was the largest communist party outside the Soviet Bloc in Europe.
Their nickname was and still is ‘mangiapreti’ (priest-eaters) and a famous local pasta dish is ‘strozzapreti’ (priest-stranglers) because the pasta resembles rope.
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