I spend quite a lot of time in Italy, especially Sicily, and love cooking there. I heard that Mussolini thought pasta made his country lethargic, nostalgic and resistant to modernity. I've also heard tell of a fascist sponsored drive to convert to risotto. Is this true? Cheers!
Mussolini raised the tariff successively in 1929-31 (from a fifth to more than a third of the price) to reduce Italy's reliance on wheat imports - 2.3 million tonnes in 1924-28, nearly a fifth of the country's grain supply. But the anti-pasta crusade seems to have been down to the futurist poet turned fascist cheerleader Marinetti, not that 650,000 tonnes of rice (30% of it exported) was about to make up the shortfall. In the event the traditional staple was saved by bumper harvests in 1929, 1932, 1933, 1935, 1937 and 1938, sparing Italians the horror of rice bolognese.
Follow-up question: if there was a Fascist anti-pasta campaign, was it connected to Italy's North-South divide?