Feste de l’Unità

The Italian communist party has always been deeply entrenched in the provinces of Emilia Romagna. Here certain ideals and a specific way of being together has become popular culture more than a political matter. It is searching for the border between the death of an ideology and its persistence in society that I started a melancholic journey into  the last red flagged Feste de L’Unità, into the Party’s peripherical branches,  into the surviving “People’s Houses”: places where time seems to have stopped and Belinguer could still come out from a kitchen, where sturdy countrywomen and centenarian retirees hang in indefinitely. Places where politics turned into folklore. It is likely that in the future nobody will replace the ladies behind the stoves, opting for a catering service. It’s a world doomed to extinction, that yet appears unchanging and eternal.