Florence has just witnessed a dazzling spectacle: a rainbow flag one kilometer long and 13 meters wide rolled out beneath the Basilica of San Miniato al Monte. It was a monumental gesture, explicitly tied to Gaza and to the call for peace.
Yet the rainbow is a tricky symbol. In Italy, it still carries the legacy of the early 2000s PACE movement, when balconies across the country were draped with multicolored banners opposing the war in Iraq. For Italians, the rainbow is shorthand for nonviolence, solidarity, and pacifism.
Step outside Italy, however, and the very same stripes tell a different story. Internationally, the rainbow is read above all as the emblem of LGBTQ+ rights and visibility. For a foreign observer, the vast banner on San Miniato’s hill might easily be mistaken for a massive Pride flag.
The association between the rainbow and LGBTQ+ rights began in San Francisco in 1978, when artist and activist Gilbert Baker designed a multicolored flag for the city’s Gay Freedom Day parade. Each color represented a different aspect of life — from sexuality and healing to sunlight and nature. Over time, Baker’s design spread across the world, becoming the universal symbol of LGBTQ+ pride and equality, instantly recognizable from New York to Sydney.
This slippage between meanings is more than a curiosity: it shows how symbols can fracture across cultures, gathering different histories and emotional charges. In Florence, the rainbow unfurled for Gaza becomes a case study in miscommunication — or, perhaps, in richness. Peace and pride are not the same, yet both hinge on ideas of dignity, equality, and humanity.
The longest rainbow flag in the world, stretched across the Tuscan hillside, thus becomes a paradox: a single banner speaking two different languages at once, depending on where you stand.
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Marco Bastiani is the founder of Florence Daily News, launched in 2011. He has worked as a journalist since 1998, and was a political editor at Il Giornale della Toscana. He later held senior roles in communications for public and private institutions. A board member of the Tuscan Foundation of the Order of Journalists, he lives in Florence, loves the sea and Greece, and has two children.
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