Fosse Ardeatine

Historic · ArdeatinoRome,Italy

Disused sand quarries outside Rome where 335 men and boys were shot in one afternoon in 1944, now 335 stone coffins under a concrete slab.

The Fosse Ardeatine are disused sand quarries on the Via Ardeatina where 335 men and boys were shot in a single afternoon in 1944. You walk into the hillside through the tunnels first, low and rough, with lamps set far apart and markers showing where each group was brought in. Then you come out into a low hall where 335 identical stone coffins lie in rows under a vast slab of raw concrete, with one thin line of light around its edge. On 23 March 1944, in an occupied city, partisans set off a bomb in Via Rasella that killed thirty-three men of a German police regiment. The order came back that ten Italians would be shot for each of them. The next afternoon prisoners were brought here in lorries, taken inside in small groups with their hands tied, and shot. Five more were killed than the order required, and they were not let go. The caves were then blown up to hide what was in them. The dead were of every kind the city held — a general, a priest, shopkeepers, students, workers, a boy of fifteen — and about seventy-five of them were Jews.

Worth knowing

Good to know

Check the hours before setting out — this site closes in the early afternoon and earlier still at weekends, and it is a long way out of the centre to find the gate locked.
Treat it as a cemetery, because it is one — families of the dead still visit, the tomb hall is not a place to take photographs, and the staff will say so if you do.
Give yourself time in the dark of the tomb hall — the slab overhead lets in almost nothing, and the rows of coffins only become countable after your eyes adjust.

Things to do

1
Walk the quarry tunnels
The walk in takes only a few minutes and there is nothing to look at. That is the whole of it: no ruin, no display, just worked rock and the markers set into the floor. The ordinariness is what makes standing there hard.
2
Stand at the edge of the tomb hall
Stop at the entrance before walking in and let your eyes adjust before you try to count anything. Then go to the nearest row and read what is cut into the stone: a name, and under it an age. Fifteen is the youngest you will find.
3
Look at the sculpture in the forecourt
Before you go in, look at the open ground in front of the entrance, where a large stone group of bound figures stands, carved in the years after the war. The carving is plain and heavy, without the heroic pose that war memorials usually take. Walk round it once, and notice that it faces the gate rather than the tombs.