One can not help but feel great humility and gratitude, to those who knowing full well the gravest consequences of their actions, exhibited the greatest bravery imaginable, and  the highest love for freedom, for their fellow man.
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Thanks to H-ITAM, Ben Lawton, Editor

The Inscriptions are fragments of poems, graffiti, random thoughts, testimonies and poignant pleas, often full of pathos and romantic idealism./ that so permeated the Italian Resistance. Instilled with a classical education, and sometimes writing in Latin or Greek, the Partisans often refer to Dante, the Bible, the Stoics and other writers of antiquity. 

The former SS and Gestapo headquarters in Rome is today an eerily quiet place. The silence is broken only when schoolchildren visit. 

Tucked away on Via Tasso in a middle-class district in the Eternal City - a stone's throw from the Basilica of St. John in Lateran - the former prison is now the Museo Storico della Liberazione di Roma, commemorating the liberation of Rome by Resistance fighters and Allied troops in June 1944.  

A lonely custodian readily admits that there are few visitors. Outside, children play in the street under the stern gaze of sober Roman matrons. Neighbors greet each other and go about their business in the shadow of an anonymous building. One can hardly imagine a setting less appropriate for war crimes and inhumane acts. 

    Yet slowly the voices begin to penetrate the walls; or rather, the voices emerge from the walls, because here, in minuscule, windowless rooms, partisans were interned between "interrogations." While awaiting the next round of torture and ultimately - almost inevitably - execution, they managed to scratch or scrawl with a pencil or a furtively hidden nail, graffiti, random thoughts, fragments of poems,
testimonies and poignant pleas. The graffiti are full of pathos and the romantic idealism that so permeated the Italian Resistance. 

Instilled with a classical education, and sometimes writing in Latin or Greek, the
prisoners often refer to Dante, the Bible, the Stoics and other writers of antiquity. 
A visitor today can still read the desperate inscriptions.
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At the Rochelle and Irwin A. Lowenfeld Conference and Exhibition Hall 
Joan and Donald E. Axinn Library, 10th Floor 

For more information, contact the Guest Curator,
Stanislao G. Pugliese at 516.463.5611 or stanislao.pugliese@hofstra.edu