The communist delegates walked out of the Socialist Party Congress at the Teatro Goldoni and made their way through the rain to this abandoned theatre (pictured below) . The building was in such poor condition that the delegates had to shelter under umbrellas inside as rain came through the damaged roof and windows. Here they held the founding congress of the Partito Comunista d’Italia (PCd’I).
At the University of Queensland in the late 1970s, occasionally we had debates about Eurocommunism, which included the Communist Party of Italy. It became the largest Communist Party in the world to achieve government through elections.
Its history is captured in a neorealist film that includes the funeral procession of its greatest leader, Palmiro Togliatti.
The film is Uccellacci e uccellini (Hawks and Sparrows), made by Pier Paolo Pasolini in 1966, two years after Togliatti’s death.
It isn’t quite a conventional neorealist film — it is a strange mixture of political fable, comedy, neorealism, surrealism and Marxist reflection. But Pasolini deliberately incorporated actual newsreel footage of Togliatti’s funeral into the film. The father and son, played by Totò and Ninetto Davoli, encounter the funeral procession during their wandering through the outskirts of Rome.
The significance is particularly interesting in the context of our UQ discussions about Eurocommunism. The talking crow in the film represents an older Marxist intellectual tradition; a title card actually describes him as a left-wing intellectual “before the death of Palmiro Togliatti.” The funeral therefore becomes, in Pasolini’s film, almost a visual metaphor for the end of that phase of Italian communism.
Here is the actual footage from Pier Paolo Pasolini’s film depicting Togliatti’s funeral.
The theatre where the PCI began was later badly damaged by bombing during the Second World War. Much of the building was destroyed, but part of the historic façade has been preserved.
Today, the façade carries a commemorative plaque and a party flag marking the foundation of the Italian Communist Party.
The detail about the umbrellas is particularly striking: contemporary historical accounts describe the San Marco as essentially a makeshift venue, with no proper seating and rain coming through the roof and broken windows. [militanzagrafica.it ]
The photograph itself nicely captures the plaque and red flag beside the surviving façade, making it a very good image for illustrating that moment in January 1921.
Ian Curr, 17 September 2026