The Massacre at the Fosse Ardeatine. History, Myth, Ritual, and ...

So the bodies were recognised through the clothes they wore, through details, photographs,
papers. This process of identification went on for months and months. And meanwhile the
memory was being appropriated by the public; it was becoming a national memory.
Thus, two types of ritual arose. First there were the private responses:
how should the dead
be mourned? Rome in 1944 was a very southern city, its population largely made of
first-generation immigrants from the rural south. They brought an extremely emotional way
of mourning the dead, described in a number of ethnographies in Southern Italy, involving
crying, losing control, just letting go. Carfla Capponi, a partisan who accompanied the wife of
one of the killed, recalls:
All her relatives were there, her son was there, and I realised this was a hellish place,
because all the parents had to recognise those pieces of bodies.
And it was a
frightening scene. They were screaming as they carried out these bodies. What can
I say?
It was a tragedy you didn’t know how to resist, to see the trembles.
I think tragedy has to be taken literally here, because the voices, the gestures, are the voices of
the ancient Mediterranean theatre – archaic Greek and Southern Italian theatre.
So you have
scenes described in the papers of very archaic forms of keening for the dead, like the image of
an old woman with a handkerchief; scenes such as used to be seen in Lucania, [British
ignorance: is Lucania ancient, or simply southern? Both: it has ancient roots, and used to be
very southern, rural and isolated. It’s the region Carlo Levi writes about in “Christ stopped at
Eboli”] moving rhythmically and crying, until the crying and the screaming become singing
and poetry and rhythm, and it soothes.
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