The Museum Monument to Political and Racial Deportees to Nazi Extermination Camps is located in the heart of the town of Carpi, in order to show how the events, it speaks of are at the heart of our history. Inaugurated on October 14, 1973 inside the Palazzo del Pio after 10 years of work, this museum is a real work of art pioneering many modes of expression to be later found in the ‘90s memorials of the 1990s.
It was designed by the Milanese firm BBPR, acronym formed by the names’ initials of its architects Banfi, Belgiojoso, Peresutti and Rogers, and its realisation is the result of a long memorial process, whose pinnacle was in 1961 with the event celebrating the centenary of the Unification of Italy. On that occasion, Bruno Losi, town’s mayor and chairman of the organising committee, emphasised in his speech the need to create something permanent to commemorate the sacrifice and pain of the deportees and suggested to do it in Carpi because the nearby Fossoli camp, was the 'first concentration camp in Italy used as ante-chamber of the Nazi extermination camps'.
Belgiojoso and his colleagues succeeded in involving several intellectuals in the project, which was modified and enriched over ten years, namely Renato Guttuso and Carlo Levi for the iconographic choices, Albe and Lica Steiner for the layout, Nelo Risi for the quotations from the Letters of the condemned to death of the European Resistance; artists such as Picasso, Léger, Cagli, Longoni and Guttuso provided the sketches for the graffiti on the walls. At the same time, Antonio Gaggero searches throughout Europe useful materials and documents for the exhibition and documentation centre. It can rightly be said that the Museum-Monument is the result of a team work involving many artists, most of them also direct witnesses of the events, who, in spite of their diverse artistic backgrounds, shared a common, anti-rhetorical and strongly symbolic design vision and decided to use their talent and mastery craft' for the benefit of the community.
The museum spans over 13 rooms - originally 14 – featuring some recurring key elements characterizing its layout: the sobriety of the grey plastered walls on which, in some rooms, the artists' graffiti stands out; the variably sized showcases, directly rising up from the natural sandstone floor and displaying a few objects, mostly chosen for their symbolic rather than documentary value; the words of Europeans Resistance members graffitied on all the walls accompanying the internal exhibition trail and defining its context. The exhibition is essential and evocative and capable of involving visitors in an intimate and emotional experience that is constantly renewed over time thanks to the choice of using the expressive power of art to narrate.
such dramatic events. The last room is the evocative Hall of Names, whose walls and vaults are entirely covered with the names of the more than 14,000 deportees from Italy reaffirming the power of resistance and of man's victory over the extermination project. Originally, it had been planned to have an additional and completely empty room, closing the exhibition loop and leading visitors to the Stone slab Courtyard, where 16 stone slabs stand, engraved in perpetual memory with the names of some of the many camps that covered Nazi-Fascist Europe. The 14th room was intended as a place to rest, to think over the visiting experience, and Mayor Losi insists that the joy expressed by running around children should be the take-home image for the leaving visitors, an image of hope and trust.
