Among Roman Ruins, the Italian Communist Party’s School

La Scuola di Frattocchie, The Frattocchie School, was a political school connected to the Italian Communist Party. Everyone who was ever anyone in the Italian Communist Party from the end World War II until the early 1990s spent time there—from Togliatti to D’Alema.

Situated along the Via Appia, about 25 kilometers from Piazza Venezia, made famous by Mussolini’s March on Rome (as a point of orientation), and a few minutes from the Pope’s “summer home,” Castel Gandolfo, the Frattocchie School today is a large, though rather unprespossessing house, with a few smaller buldings and a garage nearby, all painted red.

Indeed, it is only the color of the house that seems to evoke its past. In fact, the house was never marked with a sign. As one of my uncles told me today when I asked him how to find it—look for the sign that says KM 21 along the Appia, go a little futher ahead, and it will be on your left. Sure enough, there it was, and sure enough, online memoir-blogs about the school explain how folks used to find it with a similar reference to the kilometer marker.

As with much of the Italian Communist Party, it remains in Italy today but merely a shell of its former self.