Overview

The former camp of Fossoli in northern Italy was established in 1942 by the Royal Italian Army as a camp for prisoners of war, later becoming a Nazi-Fascist concentration and transit camp for political opponents, Jews and forced labourers. After the war it became a Catholic community for orphans and a camp for refugees from the former Italian territories of Istria until 1970. A complex system of memory and heritage stems from the legacy of the former camp: its remains, the Museum and Monument to the Political and Racial Deportee by architects BBPR, and the synagogues of Carpi. The Fondazione Fossoli, created in Carpi in 1996, manages this legacy with the purpose of preserving and transmitting the historical memory of the Fossoli camp. Linking together the history of the Holocaust, the resistance to Nazi-Fascism and the political and civic commitment that inspired the birth of the Italian Republic after the dictatorship and the war, Fossoli lies at the very core of Italy’s contemporary cultural memory. The essays in this volume analyse, from different disciplinary perspectives, the material and immaterial heritage that constitutes a rich and articulated memorial system today. Texts by Lorenzo Bertucelli, Matteo Cassani Simonetti, Pierluigi Castagnetti, Paolo Faccio, Robert S. C. Gordon, Viviana Gravano, Giovanni Leoni, Marzia Luppi, Roberta Mira, Daniele Salerno, Andrea Ugolini and Patrizia Violi.

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9781789979046

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Reviews

«The Heritage of a Transit Camp. Fossoli: History, Memory and Aesthetics is a highly original and important volume which will be of great interest for scholars of the Shoah, political deportation and fascism, and memory as well as general readers. A crucial site of Italian history and politics has finally been given the multi-layered and critical study which it deserves.» (Professor John Foot, University of Bristol) «This powerful, absolutely essential collection of essays on the heritage of the Fossoli transit camp shines a searing light on the interpenetration of history and memory at the locus of Italy’s Holocaust memorial culture. The brilliant approach to the ongoing excavation and cultivation of memory at Fossoli is a cutting edge model for how we understand the long, living duration of Holocaust memorial sites everywhere.» (Professor James E. Young, University of Massachusetts, Amherst)

The Heritage of a Transit Camp. Fossoli: History, Memory and Aesthetics is a highly original and important volume which will be of great interest for scholars of the Shoah, political deportation and fascism, and memory as well as general readers. A crucial site of Italian history and politics has finally been given the multi-layered and critical study which it deserves. (Professor John Foot, University of Bristol) This powerful, absolutely essential collection of essays on the heritage of the Fossoli transit camp shines a searing light on the interpenetration of history and memory at the locus of Italy's Holocaust memorial culture. The brilliant approach to the ongoing excavation and cultivation of memory at Fossoli is a cutting edge model for how we understand the long, living duration of Holocaust memorial sites everywhere. (Professor James E. Young, University of Massachusetts, Amherst)

Author Information

Matteo Cassani Simonetti is Senior Assistant Professor of History of Architecture at the Department of Architecture of the University of Bologna. Roberta Mira is currently Adjunct Professor of History of Conflicts at the University of Modena and Reggio Emilia. Daniele Salerno is Marie Skłodowska-Curie Global Fellow at the University of Utrecht, in collaboration with the University of Buenos Aires, and associate member of the ERC research group «Remembering Hope: The Cultural Memory of Protest in Europe» (REACT).

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