A museum is not only a container of beautiful, ancient, or rare things, but above all it is a collector of memories. For the panorama I am presenting, the memory collector is the Historical Museum of the Liberation, in via Tasso, Rome.
The building was not born as a museum, but as a civil building in the "rationalist" style at the end of the 1930s.
It was then leased to the German Embassy and housed the cultural office and the police officer, but after 8 September 1943, the date on which Italy signed the armistice with the Allies and consequently with the occupation of Italy by the Wermacht and the SS, it became the Aussenkomando (outside head office) of the SS, and the apartments at number 145 were transformed into a prison used by the SS in Rome.
Here soldiers, partisans, political prisoners, ordinary citizens rounded up, victims of a brutal and bloody repression were imprisoned and tortured.
In 1955 it was inaugurated as the Historical Museum of the Liberation.
The rooms today retain the structure and layout of the time, the cells with the tapestry of the time are now filled with documents, images and memorabilia relating to the function of the prison, its inmates and the main events linked to the Nazi-fascist occupation and Resistance.
I selected Cell No. 1, the largest, in which many of those killed at the Fosse Ardeatine were imprisoned, including a priest, Don Pietro Pappagallo.
The objects and documents on display are dedicated to their memory, from brief profiles of the fallen and those decorated for valour, to personal effects found on their remains when they were exhumed at the end of July 1944.
A museum in order not to forget the atrocities of the Nazi/fascism and of the war.
(panorama June 2023) |
