Italy marks Festa della Liberazione on 25 April.
Rome’s mayor Roberto Gualtieri will visit the Historic Museum of the Liberation of Rome on Saturday to mark Liberation Day, a national public holiday in Italy.
Held annually on 25 April, the Festa della Liberazione commemorates the end of the Fascist regime and of the Nazi occupation during world war two, as well as the victory of Italy’s Resistance movement of partisans who opposed the regime.
Many visitors to Rome are unaware of the Museo Storico della Liberazione di Roma and the horrors that once took place inside its windowless walls.
Located on Via Tasso, a nondescript side street in the city’s San Giovanni quarter, the three-storey museum is housed in what was the Gestapo headquarters during the Nazi occupation of Rome in the second world war.
Comprising prison cells and torture chambers, Rome’s Liberation Museum documents the persecution of Jews and Italian resistance figures, or partigiani, interrogated there by the SS from 1943-1944.
The museum places a particular focus on the Fosse Ardeatine Massacre when some of the 335 victims were taken from the prison on Via Tasso before being murdered in a quarry near the Appia Antica.
Amid the horror of the museum are touching messages, about life and freedom, scrawled or carved into the walls of the cells, often written by prisoners in the last hours of their lives.
Today this bleak building contains archive photographs and Gestapo documents as well as personal items belonging to the victims of the Nazi massacres at Fosse Ardeatine and Forte Bravetta.
The building’s history
Built in the late 1930s, the building was used initially as the cultural office of the German embassy in Rome, however in September 1943 it became the base of the Sicherheitspolizei (SiPo), an agency of the SS, led by Herbert Kappler.
The building’s location was also near the wartime headquarters of the Nazi Gestapo at Villa Wolkonsky, today the residence of the British ambassador to Italy.
Kappler transformed the building into a prison, its rooms turned into cells, and by January 1944 all its windows had been walled up to facilitate the imprisonment, interrogation and torture of its prisoners.
An estimated 2,000 people passed through its doors until the Liberation of Rome on 4 June 1944 when the people of Rome broke into the jail and freed the prisoners who had not been taken and murdered by the retreating SS.
Becoming a museum
The apartments occupied by the SS were donated to the Italian state in 1950 by Princess Josepha Ruspoli in Savorgnan di Brazzà, who stipulated that the rooms be used as a permanent museum.
The Museo storico della liberazione di Roma was inaugurated in 1955 by Italy’s then president Giovanni Gronchi and was opened definitively in 1957.
Visiting the museum
Entry is free but donations are encouraged for the museum’s upkeep. For full visiting details, in English, see museum website.
