Italy remembers the horrors of the Holocaust 80 years after the liberation of Auschwitz.

Italy will mark Holocaust Remembrance Day on Monday with a series of commemorative events on the 80th anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz concentration camp.

Italy's president Sergio Mattarella will mark the solemn day by joining dozens of leaders and around 50 Holocaust survivors at a ceremony at Auschwitz.

On his return to Italy, the president will mark the Giorno della Memoria with ceremonies at Palazzo Quirinale in Rome on Tuesday morning.

Italy's state archives, libraries and state museums are hosting a series of initiatives on Monday, organised by the culture ministry, to mark Holocaust Remembrance Day.

Rome is staging around 40 events, many of them involving schools and young people, as part of the city's Memoria genera Futuro programme in memory of the victims of the Holocaust.

The capital has also launched a campaign citing the words of Italian writer and Holocaust survivor Primo Levi - "“It happened, therefore it can happen again: this is the core of what we have to say” - translated into several languages and displayed at bus shelters and subway stations.

The Casina dei Vallati in the city's Jewish Ghetto quarter hosts La fine dei lager nazisti, a free exhibition documenting the liberation of the Nazi concentration camps between 1944 and 1945.

Rome authorities have installed a mural outside the Casina dei Vallati depicting two of Italy's last remaining Holocaust survivors - Liliana Segre and Sami Modiano - wearing striped concentration camp uniforms and bulletproof vests with yellow Stars of David.

A street art mural depicting two of Italy's last remaining Holocaust survivors, Liliana Segre and Sami Modiano, wearing concentration camp uniforms and bulletproof vests with yellow Stars of David, is unveiled in Rome's Jewish quarter after it was vandalised in Milan. pic.twitter.com/OPbgH8yjQC

— Wanted in Rome (@wantedinrome) January 25, 2025

Titled Anti-Semitism, History Repeating, the mural by pop artist aleXsandro Palombo was transferred to Rome after it was vandalised on two separate occasions in Milan.

Stolpersteine memorials

Rome has installed 25 new Holocaust memorial cobblestones, adding them to the hundreds of stolpersteine already present on streets around the capital.

Designed by Berlin artist Gunter Demnig, the memorials are known as stolpersteine in German - translated literally as “stumbling stones” - and are installed outside the last chosen place of residence of victims of the Holocaust.

The brass-capped blocks are dedicated to Jews and partisans, including women and children, who were mostly deported to Auschwitz or massacred at the Fosse Ardeatine in Rome.

Milan

A total of 26 stolpersteine are being installed in Milan over the coming weeks, including one dedicated to Emilia Amalia Levi - the five-year-old girl mentioned in Primo Levi's memoir Se questo è un uomo (If This Is a Man) - who was killed in Auschwitz.

The number of stolpersteine memorials in Milan will soon rise to 224 after the first one - dedicated to Liliana Segre's father Alberto - was installed in 2017.

As part of the Milan is Memory programme, the city is staging numerous commemorative events and initiatives.

These include a digital map showing Milan's Jewish population in 1938 based on a census following the racial laws promulgated by the government of fascist dictator Benito Mussolini.

Per il #Giornodellamemoria, il @ComuneMI rende consultabile la geomappa della popolazione ebraica censita a Milano nel 1938 a seguito della promulgazione delle leggi razziali fasciste, sulla base del Fondo Israeliti conservato in Cittadella degli Archivihttps://t.co/9EByZN6FMR pic.twitter.com/zAG3rPXgTX

— Comune di Milano (@ComuneMI) January 27, 2025

This year's Giorno della Memoria takes place against the backdrop of a controversy in Milan.

The city's Jewish community has decided to boycott ceremonies following a row with Italian partisan association ANPI which has accused Israel of genocide in Gaza, news agency ANSA reports.

Liliana Segre

Central to Milan's commemorative events is Binario 21, a Holocaust memorial at the city's main train station.

Binario 21 was the platform from which many of Italy's Jews were sent to the Nazi death camps, including Liliana Segre who was deported with her father to Auschwitz aged 13.

One of the few Italian Jewish children to survive a Nazi death camp, Segre is now aged 94 and lives in Milan.

She was made a senator for life in 2018, an honour in tribute to her years of speaking about the horrors of the Holocaust.

Pope Francis

During his Angeles prayer on Sunday, Pope Francis warned of the “scourge of anti-Semitism”, stating: “The horror of the extermination of millions of Jewish people and others of different faiths during those years must never be forgotten or denied.”

The pontiff cited the example of Hungarian-born poet and Holocaust survivor Edith Bruck, who he has visited in Rome, and noted that many Christians were also killed in Nazi concentration camps, including “numerous martyrs.”

Holocaust Remembrance Day

Established by the United Nations to commemorate the day in 1945 that the survivors of Auschwitz were liberated, International Holocaust Remembrance Day honours the memory of the millions of Jews – but also homosexuals, Romany people and others – who suffered persecution, deportation, imprisonment and genocide.

Cover image: Stolpersteine on Via della Madonna dei Monti. Photo credit: Only Fabrizio / Shutterstock.com.