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The town councillors obviously
had fun with this one - Via C.
Marx runs through a bastion of
capitalist enterprise - a light
industrial estate.
Spartacist co-founder Rosa
Luxemburg also gives her
name to a road through an
industrial estate.  Karl
Liebknecht for some reason,
didn't make the cut.  French
Syndicalist Georges Sorel is
reassuringly, just around
the corner!
Local boy and
anti-fascist icon,
Antonio Gramsci (he
was actually born in
Sardinia), gets a Piazza
named after him.
Ace rocket jock and hero of
the Soviet Union, Yuri
Gagarin, clocks a residential
road in a new housing estate.
Hasn't this ceased
to exist some
time ago?
One is reminded of an apposite old ditty:

The revolution!
By whom betrayed, by whom mislead?
What Stalin did and Trotsky said,
beguiles my Sabbath ease in bed
and whilst the bell from yonder steeple,
tolls out opium to the people,
'tis only just that Marx should be,
the opium of the bourgeoisie.
The Spanish civil war
looms large in the
mythology of the left.
This plaque, which
commemorates a local
volunteer killed fighting
Franco's fascists in Spain,
is inside the entrance to
Umbertide town hall.
Plotting world revolution
and selling hammer and
sickle baseball caps.  The
office of the Communist
Party in Umbertide.
The apostle of direct action
and advocate of the general
strike, Sorel believed that
only the application of force
could bring about political
change in society.
Street Names