Museo del Ricordo to remember Foibe victims.

Italy is to establish a museum in Rome to commemorate the victims of the Foibe massacres after the €8 million project got the green light from parliament on Thursday.

The bill to establish the new museum was launched in January by Italy's right-wing prime minister Giorgia Meloni and former culture minister Gennaro Sangiuliano before receiving the backing of the senate in July.

The Museo del Ricordo project got the definitive go-ahead on Thursday after the unanimous approval of the culture commission of the lower house.

The new Rome museum will recall the mass killings in Friuli-Venezia Giulia, Istria and Dalmatia by Tito's partisans, both during and after world war two.

The exact number of victims is unknown but there may have been up to 15,000 killed, many of whom were tortured, shot or pushed to their deaths into the deep, narrow carsic sinkholes or chasms known as foibe.

The newly passed bill will see the establishment of a foundation whose members will include the Italian culture ministry, the Lazio region, the city of Rome and the Friuli-Venezia Giulia region.

The new museum will "bring back to the heart of our nation a story that has been hidden for too long", according to Italy's culture minister Alessandro Giuli, who added that a major exhibition "dedicated to the Julian-Dalmatian exodus" will be held at the Vittoriano in Rome next year.

The bill allocates funding of €8 million between 2024 and 2026 for the museum which will be developed in "an important space", according to Lazio governor Francesco Rocca.

In a statement earlier this year, the culture ministry said the aim of the museum is to "preserve and renew the memory of the tragedy of the Italians and of all the victims of the foibe, of the exodus of the Istrians, Fiume and Dalmatians from their lands after the second world war, to reconstruct and narrate the history of the Italians of Istria, Fiume and Dalmatia and the more complex story of the eastern Italian border."

Giorno del Ricordo

Every year on 10 February, Italy marks the Giorno del Ricordo, an annual day of remembrance to commemorate the victims of the Foibe massacres as well as the exodus of Italians who left their homes in Dalmatia and Istria in the years after 1943.

The mass killings, which occurred in 1943 and again in the weeks before and after the end of the war in 1945, were committed mainly against the local ethnic Italian population by Yugoslav communists who occupied the Istrian peninsula during the last two years of the war.

Image: The Colosseum in Rome illuminated to mark Giorno del Ricordo on 10 February 2024. Photo RAI.