The peace flag looks at first glance like the most famous rainbow flag in the world, and it is not. It is older. Seven stripes instead of six, usually purple at the top instead of red, and the word PACE in white capitals across the middle: this is the banner of the Italian peace movement, born on a dusty road between Perugia and Assisi in 1961, seventeen years before Gilbert Baker sewed his first pride flag in San Francisco. For a few months in 2002 and 2003 it became one of the most visible objects in Italy, hanging by the million from balconies as the country argued about the coming war in Iraq.
Capitini and the road to Assisi
Aldo Capitini was a philosopher, an antifascist, and Italy's most persistent advocate of nonviolence, a man often described as the Italian Gandhi. Born in Perugia in 1899, he lost his university post in 1933 for refusing to join the Fascist Party and spent the following decades building a theory and practice of nonviolent politics from the ground up. In 1961 he organized something Italy had not seen before: a mass peace march, 24 kilometers on foot from Perugia to the Basilica of St. Francis in Assisi, held on September 24 under the name March for Peace and Brotherhood Among Peoples.
Capitini wanted a banner. He had seen photographs of the British anti-nuclear marches, where colored flags were carried, and decided the march needed something similar. The first peace flag was improvised: strips of colored cloth sewn together in a hurry in Perugia shortly before the march. One account credits Maria Francesca Siciliani, the young daughter of friends of Capitini, with buying the fabric and stitching the flag, and says Capitini gave it to her afterwards as a keepsake.
The choice of a rainbow was not decorative. The rainbow has a long history as a sign of hope and of covenant after catastrophe, an image that reads across religious and secular audiences alike. It also belonged to nobody, no party and no state, which suited a movement that wanted to gather people across political lines.
The march worked. It drew thousands, it was repeated, and it continues today: the Perugia-Assisi march remains the flagship event of the Italian peace movement, held every few years with the rainbow flag at its head. Capitini died in 1968. The flag outlived him, and the original was kept for decades by his collaborator Lanfranco Mencaroni at Collevalenza, near Todi, before being transferred to the Palazzo dei Priori in Perugia in 2011.
Seven stripes, reversed
The standard peace flag has seven horizontal stripes. From the top: purple, blue, azure, green, yellow, orange, red. Across the center, in white capitals, runs the word PACE.
Put it next to the LGBTQ+ rainbow flag and the differences are easy to list. The pride flag has six stripes; the peace flag has seven, the extra one being azure, a light sky blue sitting between the blue and the green. The pride flag runs warm to cool, red at the top; the peace flag runs the other way, cool to warm, purple at the top. And the pride flag never carries lettering, while the PACE inscription is the peace flag's defining feature. The confusion between the two is constant anyway, especially outside Italy, and Italian journalists have periodically had to explain to readers why a rainbow on a balcony in Rome does not mean what a rainbow in a shop window in London means.
Because no organization owns the design, variants circulate freely. Some flags move the purple stripe below the azure one. Some add a white stripe at the top. Some carry a dove, and versions exist with the word for peace in other languages. Earlier Italian peace banners had used the dove drawn by Pablo Picasso for the postwar peace congresses; the rainbow eventually displaced it.
Pace da tutti i balconi
The flag's extraordinary moment came four decades after Capitini's march. In the autumn of 2002, as the United States assembled its case for invading Iraq, Italian peace campaigners launched an idea credited to circles around Father Alex Zanotelli, a Comboni missionary and prominent activist: "pace da tutti i balconi," peace from every balcony. Instead of waiting for the next demonstration, Italians were asked to hang the rainbow flag from their own windows.
They did, on a scale nobody had predicted. By the early months of 2003 more than a million flags were reported hanging from balconies, windows, shopfronts, church towers, and town halls across the country. Manufacturers ran out of stock. The flag was suddenly everywhere: draped over the railings of apartment blocks in Milan, pinned in the windows of village bars in the south. On February 15, 2003, Rome hosted one of the largest anti-war demonstrations ever held anywhere, with around three million people in the streets, and the rainbow was its wallpaper.
The wave was big enough to become politically contested. Some officials objected to the flag flying on public buildings, arguing that town halls should display only official flags, while sympathetic mayors kept it up anyway. Center-left parties adopted the rainbow in their campaigning, which drew complaints that a symbol meant to sit above party politics was being claimed by one side. The arguments themselves were a measure of how far a hastily sewn banner from 1961 had traveled.
The flag since
The balcony flags faded and frayed after 2003, but the peace flag never returned to obscurity. It reappears whenever war returns to the news: it was widely flown in Italy after Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, and it remains the standard banner of the Perugia-Assisi march, which continues to draw tens of thousands of participants. Peace movements elsewhere in Europe have adopted it too, PACE lettering and all.
It is an unusual survivor among protest symbols. It has no owner, no official specification, and no institution behind it, and its closest visual relative is a far more famous flag that means something else entirely. What it has is a specific pedigree: one philosopher, one road between two Umbrian hill towns, and a September morning in 1961.
References
[1] Wikipedia, "Peace flag." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peace_flag
[2] Wikipedia (Italian), "Bandiera della pace." https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bandiera_della_pace
[3] Wikipedia, "Aldo Capitini." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aldo_Capitini
[4] Flags of the World (FOTW), "Rainbow peace flags." https://www.crwflags.com/fotw/flags/qt-pace.html
[5] Fondazione Imago Mundi, "First Peace Flag." https://fondazioneimagomundi.org/en/artista/first-peace-flag/