Rome mayor pays tribute to Iole Mancini who died aged 104.

Iole Mancini, the last surviving Italian partisan to experience the horrors of the Nazi prison on Via Tasso in Rome, died on Monday at the age of 104.

The jail in the city's San Giovanni district - today the Museum of the Liberation of Rome - was used as the Gestapo headquarters during the Nazi occupation of the capital in the second world war.

A courier for the resistance group GAP (Gruppi di Azione Patriottica), the 24-year-old Mancini was arrested on 25 May 1944 and taken to Via Tasso where she was interrogated and tortured all night.

The young seamstress defied the notorious Nazi officer Erich Priebke as he attempted to force her to reveal the whereabouts of her partigiano husband Ernesto Borghesi who had escaped from Regina Coeli prison.

Borghesi was accused of being part of the group of resistance fighters that carried out the Via Rasella attack, on 23 March 1944, which resulted in the deaths of 33 German military policemen.

The SS command in Rome under Herbert Kappler, with the approval of Hitler, ordered a brutal reprisal to the attack, leading to the mass killing of 335 civilians the next day in the Ardeatine Massacre.

On the night of 3 June, as the Allies advanced on Rome, Mancini was among the prisoners loaded onto trucks by the Nazis as they fled north.

However the truck's engine failed to start, so she was taken back to the prison, escaping the tragic fate that befell 14 other prisoners who the Nazis executed at La Storta to the north of Rome.

Mancini was freed from the Via Tasso prison the next morning by Allied soldiers during the Liberation of Rome.

In a post on social media on Tuesday, Rome mayor Roberto Gualtieri hailed Mancini as "a courageous witness of the resistance to Nazi-fascism and an exceptional woman, to whom we owe a lot", adding: "It is our duty to pass on her example and continue to defend the values for which she fought."