Roma Città Aperta, and the Mausoleum of the Fosse Ardeatine
Last month I saw Rossellini’s extraordinary film Roma Città Aperta on the big screen in Piazza San Cosimato on the occasion of its eightieth anniversary. It is set in March 1944, barely six months after the fall of Fascism and the subsequent Nazi occupation, and was released in June 1945 two months after the end of the war on Italian soil, as bomb sites across Europe still smouldered.
In the summer of 1943 Allied bombs had rained upon Rome, attacking strategic railway lines and munitions deposits. The most intense attack came on 19 July 1943 and killed some three thousand (mostly) civilians. The ancient basilica of San Lorenzo fuori le Mura was all but destroyed, and neighbourhoods including the working class districts of San Lorenzo and Pigneto, home to railway workers, were left with scars one can still see today.
On 13 August 1943 Rome was bombed again, and the following day was declared an “Open City”, which gives the film its title: Rome was to abandon resistance to avoid destruction. Barely a month later the definitive fall of the Fascist government saw the signing of the “short armistice” between Italy and the Allies at Cassibile in Sicily and following the Battle of Porta San Paolo, in the shadow of the Pyramid of Cestius and the Aurelian Walls, Rome was occupied by Nazi troops on 10 September.
One of the protagonists of Roma Città Aperta is the priest, Don Pietro, played with depth, humanity, and humour by Aldo Fabrizi. In the film Don Pietro acts as a courier among partisans. He was inspired by Don Pietro Pappagallo, a Pugliese priest who lived on via Urbana in Monti who assisted those sought by the regime: partisans and Jews, among many others.
Don Pietro Papagallo was betrayed by a German spy, arrested by the SS in January 1944, and killed on the 24 March 1944 at the Fosse Ardeatine, near the Catacombs of St Callistus. The Massacre of the Fosse Ardeatine followed a partisan attack at via Rasella (close to Palazzo Barberini) the previous day which had killed thirty-three soldiers of the SS Police Regiment Bozen (referred to by German officers as the Tyrolean Blockheads). In retaliation three hundred and thirty-five Italians were killed. They were almost all civilians, a mix of political prisoners and people rounded up at random; rich and poor, young and old. Seventy-four were Jews.
They were taken to the Fosse Ardeatine, disused quarries of pozzolana on the via Ardeatina. Here the three hundred and thirty-five victims were shot in the back of the head at close range, and the caves blown up to conceal the massacre which would subsequently be decreed a war crime. After the war the bodies (of whom eight are unidentified) were exhumed and the excavated caves shored up. The dead were reburied in the low, solemn concrete memorial, its innate claustrophobia lifted by the sliver of light shining beneath; the giant communal tombstone—hollow reinforced concrete—pressing upon victims and visitors alike. The project was a collaboration between the architects Giuseppe Perugini, Natale Aprile, and Mario Fiorentini and was inaugurated on 24 March 1949, on the fifth anniversary of the massacre.
It is an extremely moving site which I most recently visited on Tuesday on my way to the beach which is when these photographs were taken. I was the only person there.
At the entrance the vast travertine statue is by Francesco Coccia. Called Le Tre Età it alludes to the disparate ages of those killed. A panoply of lives brutally truncated at these caves on the via Ardeatina: and among them a priest, who would inspire Don Pietro in Rossellini’s extraordinary film, Roma Città Aperta. If you haven’t seen it do, I defy you not to cry.
Visiting information here: Mausoleum of the Fosse Ardeatine
After having read a shattering book on the subject of the assault and revenge of the German I visited the Via Rassella, where the assault on the Germans took place. I was looking for maybe a memorial plaquette when I was accosted by a man, of about sixty years who asked if he could help. We stood, as soon turned out, on the spot where his mother during the war had had a laundry. After the assault he (a baby then) and his parents were arrested, to be killed as a reprisal, obviously. He and his mother were eventually released, his father sadly ended among the victims. This man talking to me, his only son, older now than his father was ever allowed to grow, had been visiting schools to tell the horrifying history of his family. He showed me the bullit holes in the surrounding buildings, still there, and also told me where to find the plaquette (in the via Barberini). I was extremely lucky and it was very moving to see and speak with this survivor, since I was there to look into what was effectively the story of his life...
My memories of this encounter were finally complemented in quite an emotional way, when I visited the mausoleum later that day finding the tomb of his father at the mausoleum. It had his picture on it and I was saddened, not to say a little mortified, to see how his older son resembled the father he never had been allowed to know.
Reading your story brought these memories back and I thought it would be good to share this with you and your readers.
I've seen Roma Citta Aperta, and agree it's very emotional. I'd love to see it on the big screen. The cave has been on my list to visit. I'd planned to go when I was in Rome with my students in 2022, since Italy in WWII is a subject they'd studies, but unfortunately, Covid intervened. It'll have to wait for the next time I'm in Rome.