Military men, members of the resistance, historical opponents of fascism. Political exponents of all the parties of the resistance arc. Men of all ages and religious faiths, of all geographical origins and of all social classes and of all levels of education: aristocrats, bourgeois, high officials, but also and above all many ordinary people: butchers, clerks, farmers, freelancers .
They are the 335 victims of the Fosse Ardeatine massacre, the 80th anniversary of which was celebrated only a few days ago, and of which for the first time, in a systematic manner, the complete biographies are reconstructed and proposed. This is the merit of the latest effort by the pair of historians Mario Avagliano and Marco Palmieri, who published with Einaudi the volume "The broken lives of the Fosse Ardeatine. The stories of the 335 victims of the massacre symbol of the Resistance".
The massacre, carried out by the Nazis on 24 March 1944 under the command of the Rome SS chief Herbert Kappler, in retaliation for the partisan attack in Via Rasella which cost the lives of 33 German soldiers, is one of the most famous historical pages and present in the collective imagination of the country. For the first time Avagliano and Palmieri have undertaken in a complete, exhaustive and methodical manner, the duty of bringing to memory the lives and stories of all the martyrs of the massacre, from the best known to those who for years were buried in the oblivion. Their work, conducted through meticulous research into sources, from the diaries and letters of the martyrs, their families or comrades in the struggle, to the police papers, the prison records, the documents and reports of the parties and movements they belong to, but even the cards used for the identification of the bodies, the documents of the Kappler trial, the posthumous memories and constant contact with the families, thus provides an overall portrait of what the historian Alessandro Portelli defined as "a true geographical, political cross-section , social aspect of the Italian national identity".
The attempts to give a face and a name to the martyrs of that massacre, in fact, began immediately, thanks to the commitment of Attilio Ascarelli, the doctor who first had the task of exhuming and identifying the bodies and who left a substantial file entitled "Short biography of the 320, with 291 biographical notes". In the following years, however, this first willing research starting point did not have the necessary follow-up, dispersing into a varied historiographical production, often dedicated to examining only individual aspects or individual protagonists of that historical period.
Some of them, such as Colonel Giuseppe Montezemolo (head of the clandestine military front and protagonist of the coup d'état of 25 July 1943), received the greatest prominence, and Avagliano himself dedicated a monograph to him, as well as to his fellow citizen Sabato Martelli Castaldi. Equally well-known names are those of the carabinieri Giovanni Frignani and Raffaele Aversa, who participated in the arrest of the Duce and were among the pillars of the "Caruso gang". In-depth biographical notes were also present in an early volume by Avagliano himself, "Muoio Innocent", dedicated to the letters of those condemned to death in the Roman resistance.
After the war, many of them received the most disparate recognitions: in every part of Italy, some of them had streets, schools, barracks and parks named after them. Plaques and stumbling blocks have been placed at their places of birth, residence or work. Some were awarded medals (35 gold, 25 silver and 4 bronze for military valour, plus a gold and a silver medal for civil merit) or crosses of merit. Equally numerous, however, are the "nameless", ordinary people, united with the most illustrious figures whose tragic end was at the hands of the Nazi-fascists, but about whom very limited or almost no information was available, and who now find visibility.
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