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Rome remembers Holocaust victims with new cobblestone memorials

By: Wanted in Rome

Date:

10 Jan, 2024

**Rome installs new stolpersteine memorials**.

Rome has installed new brass cobblestone memorials to Holocaust victims at 21 locations across the capital, ahead of International Holocaust Remembrance Day on 27 January.

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, which have been added to the hundreds of stolpersteine already present on Rome's streets, are dedicated to Jews and partisans, including women and children, who were either deported to Auschwitz or killed at the Fosse Ardeatine in Rome.

The stumbling stones of Jewish memorials

The new stolptersteine were installed between Monday and Wednesday as part of the 15th edition of the Memorie d'Inciampo commemorative project overseen by the Arte in Memoria association.

The memorials can be found in Garbatella, S. Lorenzo, the Jewish Ghetto district and the historic centre, as well as in Acilia, halfway between Rome and Ostia.

The memorials in Garbatella - on Via Massaia 22 and 65 - are dedicated to partisans Giuseppe Felici and Libero De Angelis.

Felici was killed in the Fosse Reatine massacre on 9 April 1944, Easter Sunday, when 15 partisans were shot dead by Nazi troops and buried in a mass grave.

De Angelis was jailed in the notorious Nazi prison on Via Tasso before being murdered along with 13 other prisoners in La Storta, in the northern outskirts of Rome, during the Nazi retreat on 4 June 1944.

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Noemi Di Segni, president of the Union of Italian Jewish Communities (UCEI), said that Demnig's idea is "very effective" in making passersby reflect after "visually stumbling" on the memorial stones.

She also said the memorials provide a "warning for new generations not to forget, especially in these days amid winds of denialism and a return of those nostalgic for Nazi-fascism", citing the ongoing controversy over footage of hundreds of men making fascist salutes at the Acca Larentia rally in Rome on Sunday.

Cover photo credit: Thoom / Shutterstock.com.