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Diffuse and Divided Memory: Grassroots Commemoration of the Fosse Ardeatine
Maldari, Lindsay
Maldari, Lindsay
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Abstract
On March 23, 1944, during Rome’s 9-month Nazifascist occupation, Italian Resistance fighters orchestrated a bombing attack on via Rasella which resulted in 33 German casualties. Less than 24 hours later, SS troops retaliatorily executed 335 Italians in a set of abandoned caves now infamously known as the Fosse Ardeatine. The monument inaugurated at the site in 1949 is widely considered to be Italy’s first modern monument as well as an exceedingly rare national Resistance memorial. Yet while the importance of the Mausoleo delle Fosse Ardeatine is indisputable, it is the goal of the present study to recognize the narratives that cannot fit within a univocal monument to a mass tragedy.
To do so, this project will provide an analytic survey of various grassroots commemorative practices used to honor the victims of the Fosse Ardeatine across time. Through a mixed methodological approach that combines art history with memory and reception studies, grassroots commemoration is defined as memorials that have been spontaneously created by extrainstitutional actors rather than official, state-sponsored commission. To first contextualize the need for grassroots commemoration of the massacre, this project will reconstruct the strained dynamics and abundant criticism leveled by the victims’ families towards the monument. In so doing, the dissonance between private and public memory of the Resistance and the competing needs of familial mourning and institutional commemoration becomes clear.
From there, two primary types of grassroots memorials created by familial and political groups in the years following the massacre will be analyzed; spontaneous shrines of portrait photographs placed by the victims’ families in the Fosse Ardeatine caves, and commemorative plaques erected throughout Rome’s urban fabric by the political parties affiliated with the victims. Despite their mutual function as individualized memorials for the massacre victims, the spontaneous shrines and memorial plaques served different audiences and functioned according to fundamentally distinct commemorative logics. The phenomenological experience and rhetorical impact of each memorial format illustrates the simultaneously personal and political functions of grassroots memorials.
Lastly, attacks on Resistance memory from the ‘New Right’ in recent years have meant that Fosse Ardeatine memorials sites are now frequent stages for counter-memory as expressed through acts of revision, vandalism, and, ultimately, destruction. The contestedness of Resistance memory in recent years has, however, also prompted a resurgence of positive iterations of grassroots commemoration for the Fosse Ardeatine and has reframed the massacre’s ethical commemoration as a form of contemporary antifascist activism.
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Master of Arts in Art History -- John Cabot University, Spring 2022.
Date
2022
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Keywords
Mausoleo delle Fosse ardeatine (Rome, Italy), Jewish Holocaust (1939-1945), Holocaust memorials
Citation
Maldary, Lindsay. "Diffuse and Divided Memory: Grassroots Commemoration of the Fosse Ardeatine". Master's Thesis, John Cabot University, Rome, Italy. 2022.