Obj. ID: 52110  Fosse Ardeatine Mausoleum Complex in Rome, Italy

The Fosse Ardeatine (Ardeatine caves or quarries) is the site south of Rome where Nazi occupiers massacred 335 Italians and others, including 75 Jews, in retaliation for the killing of 33 German soldiers in a partisan attack on 23 March 1944. German commanders retaliated killing 10 Italians for every German soldier killed in the attack.

Germans and some Italian fascist colleagues scrambled to find victims, first choosing prisoners already facing likely death sentences, but they quickly included many more prisoners and others to meet the determined retaliatory number. 75 Roman Jews, imprisoned just because they were Jewish, were chosen. The murders took place in the “caves,” – actually tunnels of the former quarry. They were direct and brutal – shots to the neck – and the bodies piled up. To hide their crime the perpetrators blew up the entrances to the caves. But there were witnesses to the German trucks filled with prisoners and the explosions, and soon it the massacre was known, at least in general terms.

The massacre was the single most violent act carried out by Germans on Italian soil, and the Fosse Ardeatine massacre is now synonymous with the barbarity of the German occupation. For Jews, it was also the single greatest crime against Jewish citizens carried out on Italian soil, though the number of Jewish victims is still small compared to the number of Jews deported from Italy to labor and death camps in occupied Poland (Auschwitz, Belzec, etc.).

After the war the caves were opened, bodies exhumed and mostly identified, and then in 1949 a memorial and mausoleum for the victims was created.  Immediately after the war’s end, the municipality of Rome announced a competition for the arrangement of the Ardeatine quarries and the construction of a monument in memory of the victims of the massacre. It was the first architectural competition in liberated Italy.

Two groups were named joint winners: one with architects Nello Aprile, Cino Calcaprina, Aldo Cardelli, Mario Fiorentino, and the sculptor Francesco Coccia (who created the monumental sculpture of three figures titled "The Three Ages of Man"); and one with architects Giuseppe Perugini and Mirko Basaldella (who designed the metal gates). The two groups combined to design the memorial or shrine, and the tomb. The monument was inaugurated on March 24, 1949.