On 24 March 1944, 335 Italians were murdered in the Pozzolana quarries, along the Via Ardeatina in Rome, as a reprisal following the partisan action in Via Rasella in which 33 German soldiers had died the day before who, since September 1943, had occupied the city. The victims of the Ardeatine were soldiers, members of the resistance, opponents of fascism, political exponents of all the anti-fascist parties, men of all ages and religious faiths (75 Jews), of all geographical origins, of all social classes and of all level of education: aristocrats, bourgeois, high officials, but also and above all many common people.
Most of the victims had emigrated from different Italian regions. Among these, 19 Apulians included in the list of victims destined for the Fosse Ardeatine, prepared by the head of the SS of Rome Herbert Kappler and by the Italians Pietro Caruso, police commissioner of Rome and Pietro Koch, leader of the gang of the same name, on the basis of a common denominator: explicit dissent towards fascism.
Among the Apulians killed in the Ardeatine with a shot to the back of the head were Giuseppe Lotti, an anti-fascist in the Action Party arrested by the Special Squad of the Central Police Headquarters, and Vincenzo Saccotelli, an anti-fascist in the Action Party arrested by the Koch Gang.
The massacre is one of the best known and most present pages of history in the collective memory of the country. For the first time Mario Avagliano and Marco Palmieri with the book “The broken lives of the Fosse Ardeatine” they bring to mind the lives and stories of all the martyrs of the massacre, from the best known to those who were buried in oblivion for years. Their work, conducted with meticulous research into sources, provides a chilling overall portrait of what the historian Alessandro Portelli defined “a real geographical, political and social cross-section of the Italian national identity”.
The book “The broken lives of the Fosse Ardeatine” will be presented, on the initiative of the Municipality of Andria and the National Association of Partisans of Italy, in the Council Room at Palazzo di Città Saturday 11 May 2024 at 6pm.
After the greetings of the municipal administration, the provincial president of ANPI BAT, Antonello Rustico and the president of the ANPI of Andria, Gemma De Chirico, the journalist Nunzia Saccotelli will talk with Mario Avagliano, co-author of the volume.
