Over the next two days I have one goal - to eat more pasta. All the pasta, in fact
We arrived in Rome yesterday, we’re here for a visit for the weekend, and since then, I’ve been single minded in my pursuit of eating the four classical Roman pastas.
Cacio e Pepe
La Gricia
Amatriciana
Carbonara
A Quattro of different cheeses, delivered with what, so far, has been some haste - that haste being on the back of Gatwick shitting the bed again over the past week and us arriving a full day late.
No matter though, because upon landing yesterday in an absolutely sweltering Rome, and after an obligatory one hour cool down in the hotel and to wash off the grime of travelling between airports and train stations, we were off.
For my husband, it was to go see the Spanish steps. For me it was to find Caccio e Pepe - and my god, once I did, I was converted. It blows my mind completely just how good a dish made out of three ingredients can be.
Pasta. Black pepper. Pecorino.
It was stunning - and everything I could have hoped for. The cheese itself, so punchy it actually made my mouth itch. The creaminess. The sharpness of the pepper.
Magnifique.
Pasta obsessions aside - Rome is something different. A 2,700 odd year old city with history literally pouring out of every crevice and crook and cranny. It honestly does feel like you can’t turn your arse sideways without landing straight into a thousand year old forum.
The marble glistens in the bright summer sunlight, and even the crowds of thousands of influencers all making one of the three variations of duck face (bored, bemused, baffled), couldn’t detract from the grandeur of it all.
Which obviously made me think of fascism.
Not the influencers, of course - but that grandeur. A grandeur and history that was appropriated and co-opted by Benito Mussolini in the early 20th century. And you can totally understand why it would work - bedeck something like the Piazza Venezia in enough paternalistic, nationalistic imagery, and you’re going to have even the most ardent proponents say “holy shit, this guy is serious.”
The touches of fascism are still dotted throughout the city - from the more subtle reminders like the fasces motifs still dotted here and there, the fascist era dates still written according to the regimes then calendar to the eagles that are spotted occasionally lurking above these modern streets.
There is a lot of history here, begging to be further explored, and you can bet that I’ll be doing so over the next few days we’re here. It’s also a history that I can’t help feel is happening closer to home.
Over the past week, we’ve seen rather a lot of Danny “Thommo” Thomas, mate to Tiny Tommy Ten Names, aka Stephen Yaxley Lennon, aka Tommy Robinson and his black shorts, the so-called Paypal Patriots.
I mean Patriot Platform.
From their first foray onto the national stage with their disruptive wander around Dover to intimidate… checks notes… families coming back from their holiday in France, to their shocking intrusion into Portsmouth 36 hours later to harass RNLI volunteers for literally just doing their unpaid jobs, things turned dark. The level of organisation, as I mentioned in a post earlier this week was worrying, and their subsequent doxing of two RNLI volunteers was disgusting.
But as ever, if you leave the British Far-Right to their devices for long enough, they’re going to veer straight into the utterly batshit side of doing things.
By Wednesday, the dark cloud over this group of blackshorts very suddenly dissipated for me personally when Mr Thomas took a cadre of his balaclava’d mates for a demonstration outside of the Daily Mail’s offices in London.
Now, this caused a little bit of a crisis for me - I abhor the Mail. That rag is responsible for so many of the ills we face in society, and I couldn’t help but feel that there was a beautiful irony in them being stared down by a group of men that I imagine old Mosley himself would have been proud to associate with. Had the Mail finally had its comeuppance nearly a hundred years on when they had, themselves, celebrated black shirts?
Sadly, no - because Mr Thomas then finally made his demand clear:
He would like the Daily Mail, who he had accused of doxing his dear mum’s address (of a house she had spent weeks - nay, months!) decorating. This is, of course, not what happened. The Daily Mail had written an article in which they described Thomas’s mum as living in a neat house in Chichester, and later in the same article, made reference to Thomas’s business. Which he had, for reasons only known to himself, registered to her address.
Now, I will be the first to say, I think that doxing anyone is abhorrent. There is no good reason to do so, and considering the climate we are currently living through, it is genuinely dangerous. I’m not going to touch on the sheer weapons grade hypocrisy of Thomas and his mates doing the exact same thing to RNLI volunteers, but the point remains - it’s a huge no-no in my mind.
The Daily Mail, for all its many, many faults, in this case did not explicitly dox anyone. And they knew this. So the demand for his mum to get a new house was, I presumed, laughed manically straight out the building.
But fear not - for there was that often trod avenue for the far-right still available to Thomas:
A fund raiser.
Very shortly after Thomas and his bungling band of blackshorts departed the offices of the Daily Mail, that Give-Send-Go beacon was brightly lit up. Within no more than 48 hours, the £10k appeal was met and surpassed, and by the last time I checked, it had raised more than £65k.
Nice job if you can get it, hey?
Now, for anyone who is concerned that this is just yet another fundraising scam perpetrated by an opportunistic grifter - I am very happy to reassure you that Thomas has made it clear that his mum would only be using what’s needed to relocate, and the rest would be used for “to instruct a top legal team to deal with what has happened and take the appropriate legal action against the Daily Mail.”
I, for one, am not 100% convinced, but that might just be me.
This whole weeklong saga has done one big thing - it’s just made the far-right look even grubbier than it already was. No less dangerous, believe you me, but certainly just that much more… gauche.
The ethnonationalism espoused by Thomas and his group is just so tacky. So basic. From the cheap Poundland flags littering vast swathes of Kent, to that opportunistic sprint to any excuse to create a Give-Send-Go page, it’s all pedestrian.
Being in the birthplace of fascism, I can’t help but feel that even Mussolini would have judged these guys. While their goals will eventually fully align, their way of getting there is going to almost certainly be filled with less grandeur and more cheap merch, monetised outrage and digital begging bowls.
To be abundantly clear: I have no affection whatsoever for Mussolini, fascism, or the murderous authoritarianism they represent not do I think that the grubbiness surrounding this new age of rising fascism makes it any less dangerous. My contempt for this new iteration is just that much deeper precisely because it wraps the same rotten impulses that came to light in the early 20th century in something so cringeworthy, transactional and embarrassingly online.
Same poison. Less marble. More PayPal.
Anyway, that is quite enough fascism for one weekend. I have three more Roman pastas to eat, several thousand years of history to gawp at, and absolutely no intention of wasting Rome on Danny fucking Thomas.
Have a lovely weekend, excuse me while I go hunt down a Gricia.
A well deserved week of R’n’R.
The best description of our black shirts that I’ve heard so far is from Kenny on the ‘Quiet Riot’ pod cast who called them, ‘The Provisional Wing of Sports Direct’. That’ll stick!
As an archaeologist I was fortunate to work in Rome and Verona, my favourite memory is of the pizzas slightly different from Sainsbury’s frozen efforts.