The Massacre of the Ardeatine Caves was a reprisal killing perpetrated by the German occupying forces in Rome, following an ambush by the Italian partisans on 23 March 1943 in via Rasella, Rome where a bomb exploded causing the death of 33 Nazi soldiers. The following day, 24 March, 335 men were rounded up, taken to the tufa quarries on the Ardeatine Way and shot. At the end of the war, in 1946, a competition was held for the construction of a monument in memory of the massacre and the task was entrusted jointly to the two winning groups, resulting in a project of unprecedented symbolic and visual clarity. Aldo Aymonino, professor of architectural composition at Venice University, remarked that (the monument) “addresses the ‘life journey’ theme as if it were a narrative, with its twofold aspects – the emotional and the spiritual. Thus, the monument is a sort of topographic map of pain and memory and we today are thus still witnesses of that massacre, rather than spectators.”
