Abstract

Faced with the collapse of the Italian Communist Party and Italy’s both economic and political crisis in the 2000s and 2010s, many left-activists have mounted a rear-guard action trying to reassert the principles of the Resistance. However, rarely do debates concerning the legacy of the anti-fascist struggle acknowledge the variety of Resistance forces’ social and political goals, far from it being a single patriotic movement. This article focuses on the experience of Bandiera Rossa, the largest partisan force in Rome during the German occupation, to argue that the Resistance involved both a struggle over postwar Italy and a battle to define a communist movement re-emerging after twenty years of Fascist repression.