“A plate of spaghetti”

A plate of spaghetti is a comic, minimizing expression applied to the revolution that brought Benito Mussolini’s government to power. Its force lies in the contrast it creates: the change is acknowledged as unconstitutional, yet presented as so typically Italian and undramatic that it should cause little alarm. The phrase returns in accounts of the March on Rome, where its domestic familiarity sits beside descriptions of revolution and the deaths left in its wake.

The phrase and the revolution

In a letter dated November 3, 1922, the political change is characterized as a revolution, but one that was typically Italian and a plate of spaghetti. The comparison makes the upheaval seem commonplace rather than momentous. The same passage acknowledges that the change was completely unconstitutional, then argues that this should not, by itself, arouse much apprehension. The phrase thus participates in an argument that recognizes the breach while diminishing its significance.

A label among competing accounts

Fifteen days after the March on Rome, the press had already supplied sharply different descriptions of the event: a joyful revolution, a bloodless revolution, a dawn of a new era, a farce, and a plate of spaghetti. The phrase belongs to this unsettled contest over how the transfer of power should be understood. Its lightness contrasts with the grandeur of revolutionary language, but also with the account’s concrete reminder that Rome had seen nineteen people killed and twenty seriously injured during those same fifteen days.

The phrase’s effect

Rather than explaining the political change, the expression frames it. Calling the revolution a plate of spaghetti makes an unconstitutional rupture sound familiar and almost harmless; placed alongside the reported casualties, that casualness becomes conspicuous. The phrase therefore captures the distance between the reassuring language used to characterize the change and the violence that accompanied it.