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

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is true: they have as little historical memory as their parents and grandparents, that is to say, from whom they have learnt the wrong version of events, which they repeat. Others, fortunately, have no version at all. I say fortunately because they don’t know the wrong version; there is nothing screening them from the knowledge of what really happened and its meaning. Thus many young people do not make that automatic connection between the attack and the massacre, as cause and effect. They do not shift their gaze away from the fact of the massacre. They may have a hard time historicising it, because they don’t really know what was going on; but they symbolise it beautifully. “The story, honestly, I don’t really remember it,’ one high school student told me. “I don’t remember it very well, to tell the truth. But the name makes me think. I know it makes me think, ‘Fosse Ardeatine’”. (The word ‘fosse’ is significant in this train of thought. The “Fosse” were originally quarries, and the Italian for ‘quarries’ is cave, which is why they’re known as “caves” in English (as well as because they were underground). Soon after the War the name was changed to “Fosse” which means “graves”, but also “ditches”.) So he continued, “Fosse Ardeatine. And I have this image of this huge ditch where they dumped people. What I imagine … this is what I imagine. A place where people are dumped, mutilated, massacred”. “Like trash?” I asked him. And he said, “Yes, exactly. Like trash. Taken and thrown away, as if they were sacks of potatoes or things. You know what it makes me think? It makes me think of the annihilation of the value of life. This is what it makes me think of. Man treated like a thing, like a piece … I don’t know, like a rag”. This description is uncannily right: “like a piece”. We all remember that the Nazis called “stucke”, pieces, the prisoners that they deported to the extermination camps. And in the Fosse Ardeatine they tried to cover the caves with trash, in order to hide the stench that was rising out of these bodies. 18
So what do young people see there? They see an image of absurd death, of sudden, casual death; death that is not the result of any natural process. And this ties in with their own experience of death. What I’ve realised, doing this book, is that my generation, that which grew up in the post-War boom years, was exceptional, in the sense that it was a generation in which death was invisible. The death of young people was very exceptional; the middle-class ethic of hiding death from children prevailed. For today’s young people things are different. There were three suicides in my older son’s high school class. There are at least 12 markers made by young people, with flowers, photographs, soccer cards, of their contemporaries who died in accidents on the road where I live. And they know about death by drugs. So they are familiar with death. But since the older generation still believes that they know nothing about it and should not be exposed to it, nobody helps them deal with death; they have to come to terms with it on their own. The Fosse Ardeatine is one of the symbols. An outing to the Fosse Ardeatine is a typical school trip. Sometimes they make a joke of it; sometimes they’re truly shocked and moved. But what is shocking and moving is no longer anti-Fascism, or any other political cause; it’s the presence of death. The pioneering book on the Fosse Ardeatine massacre, by Robert Katz, was called Death in Rome, Morte a Roma 1967, Rome, Editori Riuniti – I don’t have the original publisher. Publisher, date? I think it’s very appropriate, but it’s broader than he meant it. It’s really about the meaning of death in a modern city, and the meaning of the memory of death. So I’d like to close with a brief narrative on death, memories, ceremony, and the sense of history. The monument to the victims of the massacre is also a cemetery; there are three hundred and thirty-five concrete graves [in one enormous room], raised from off the ground, and the concrete slab on top, a huge [stone ceilingchest??] with a slight opening where it is lifted at the edge. This isn’t very clear – could you check? This man - one of the few men – is a son, Modesto De Angelis: 19
Page 1 and 2: The Massacre at the Fosse Ardeatine
Page 3 and 4: Now, this is not the way it happene
Page 5 and 6: moment of the attack; but as there
Page 7 and 8: So this is what is at stake in this
Page 9 and 10: unarmed. According to the German Co
Page 11 and 12: value, as Ernesto de Martino says,
Page 13 and 14: So the bodies were recognised throu
Page 15 and 16: They didn’t; but their heterogene
Page 17: It never happened. They didn’t wa

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