Milan has long been the center of finance, fashion, and Ferraris. It is also both the birthplace of Italian fascism and a center of anti-fascist resistance.
On April 29, 2026, 107 years after Mussolini formed his fascist party in Milan and anti-fascist Partisans began their resistance, far-right groups marched to mark the death of a neo-Nazi leader, and antifascist protestors confronted them.
It was a busy week for manifestations. April 25th was the 81st anniversary of the liberation of Milan by workers who took over factories and ousted both Mussolini and the German Nazis. The celebrations in the city were massive. Then, a few days later, when Israel attacked the Samood Flotilla bringing food and medicine to Gaza, Milanese people came out again in force.
I had been in Italy in August and September 2025, when Italians across the country held a general strike in solidarity with Palestinians and the first Sumud Flotilla I followed events In Milan in February, 2026 when the US sent Homeland Security—the Department that oversees ICE—to the Winter Games in Milan, Milanese—who had been watching with horror while ICE terrorized my state, my city, my south Minneapolis neighborhood—marched holding banners with the message, “not in Minnesota, not in Milan.”
Photo: AP, by Antonio Calanni
I was grateful.
I thought Milan would be a good place to be on May Day. We were a two-hour train ride away. May Day is a federal holiday in Italy — International Workers’ Day. The origin is, of course, the Haymarket Massacre in Chicago in 1886. Ironically, the United States is one of the few countries without official celebrations. I knew May Day would be a day off in Milan, with picnics and people enjoying the spring. I found FB notices about marches begining at 2 pm. We spent the morning walking in the BAM park, among fields of wild blossoms. I loved the flowers and the people loving the flowers, filming them from every angle. I called them the poppy-razzi. 
For lunch, we sought out a Lebanese cafe where we found a crocheted watermelon surrounded by candles and incense in the bathroom, a symbol of support for Palestinians.
We found the people with the Palestinian flags and joined them. I hate patriotic flags and nationalism of any kind — that is the Jewish lesson I learned as the child of a Holocaust refugee. But I have been marching with Palestinian flag-holders since October 10, understanding its current symbolic power, though I don’t carry one myself. All politics is compromise.
We marched for a mile down Via Padova, with a mostly Arab group that inched along, followed and led by a small police escort. It felt good to speak out against genocide and endless war in our name.
The next day, we ate at a Moroccan place that was LGBTQ friendly. We had two soups, two rounds of bread, rich in bran and seeds, and two cups of mint tea, served by two waiters, so lovely and welcoming to us, though we only spent ten euros. We walked back to the massive central train station with its lions and frescos, headed back to the tiny Swiss village where we are staying this spring, in a friend’s home.
Though I knew of and marched with activists in Basil in July of 2025, I had thought we would need to go to a big city to find people who would protest the current terror. I was gratified that in Lugano, Switzerland, a town of 63,000, on the Swiss-Italian border, ten miles from us, three thousand people marched on May Day against a proposed anti-immigrant legislation supported by the far right, capping the country’s population at 10 million. Swiss people will vote on the proposal on June 14. Big cities, small towns, Global South, Global North: Immigrant rights, workers’ rights, ending the endless wars, and the genocide against Gaza— these are the four main streams in the river of global resistance in the spring of 2026.
In the 19th century, here in the Italian/Swiss borderlands, women who worked in the rice paddies of the Po Valley coined the folk song that would become Belle Ciao, an Italian, and now an international, antifascist anthem.
Bella ciao,bella ciao,
bella ciao, ciao, ciao.
We want liberation now.
This essay about a visit to Milan, Italy, on May Day 2026, is part of a series. In October 2023, my spouse and I sold our house in Minneapolis, MN. USA. Since then, we have been traveling the world. I write a blog about each place, with a historian’s eye and an internationalist lens, wondering how memory can liberate the present.