Anti-fascist movements in Republican Italy (1945–2018)

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article examines the political movements that from the end of the Second World War until 2018 have explicitly inscribed themselves in the tradition of anti-fascism: the women who built nursery schools in Emilia Romagna; the young people with the ‘striped T-shirts’; the students of 1968; the protesters who mobilized on 25 April 1994 to defend the values of the Resistance and the constitution after Silvio Berlusconi’s rise to power; the ‘Panther’. Finally, it will examine a wide arc of political actors – including immigrants – who united anti-racism and anti-fascism after Luca Traini’s 2018 attempted massacre in Macerata. The article highlights how, over the decades, anti-fascism has proven to be a generative resource: it has not only been transmitted to new generations and new social actors, but has also been given new meaning over time to address new questions coming from the present. The fascism evoked has never been an eternal and a-historical phenomenon or a simulacrum of it.