The existence of this museum in Carpi is due to the presence, from 1943 to 1944, of a collection and concentration camp for prisoners destined for deportation in the hamlet of Fossoli. On the walls there are graffiti by Picasso, Guttuso, Léger, and Cagli. The museum also collects objects, messages, and letters from the deportees. In the outdoor courtyard, 16 steles are placed with the names of some Nazi concentration camps engraved on them. The Monument Museum was inaugurated following a commitment undertaken by the Municipality already in the immediate postwar years to honor the memory of the victims of the Nazi-fascist deportations. In fact, a few kilometers from the city, in the hamlet of Fossoli, there was a collection and transit camp for Italians destined for extermination camps. The museum is located in a wing on the ground floor of the Castello dei Pio. It was designed (after an international competition) by architect Ludovico Belgiojoso’s studio (also an internee) in a form that “aims to create – in his words – an emotion still valid many years later.” Few objects, placed in the center of each room, were selected by Lica and Albe Steiner for the strength of their evocative power of life conditions in concentration camps. The Monument Museum to the Deported was inaugurated in 1973, but its conception dates back to the immediate post-WWII period to keep alive the memory of the human sacrifice of Jews and fighters during World War II in the nearby Fossoli Camp. The Museum project was carried out by the BBPR group, that is Belgioioso, Banfi, Peressutti, and Rogers, in collaboration with Renato Guttuso; the rationale for awarding the work to this group of architects was identified by the administration and the promoting committee in their ability to conceive a museum free of easy rhetoric and banal symbolism. Located on the ground floor of the Castle, it develops along thirteen rooms, some of which are frescoed relating to the themes of peace and Resistance, commemorating the deportees, by Pablo Picasso, Emilio Longoni, Corrado Cagli, Fernand Léger, and Renato Guttuso; alternating with evocative and touching thoughts of those sentenced to death of the European Resistance who, through graffiti, raise civic awareness for peace. In 1999, the son of the Milanese painter Aldo Carpi, the writer Pinin, donated 150 works by his father to the Museum, who lived through and visually reported the tragedies of the two world wars; in particular The Gunsen Diary, drawings dense with pathos worked with synthetic photographic realism, narrating the horror produced by the Nazi camps on men. The Museum’s exhibition activity is aimed at continuing the memory of the Nazi atrocities as a memento and warning to prevent the repetition of such cruelties; here, documentary or artistic exhibitions are often held that have a close connection with the Resistance, the Jewish sacrifice of the Holocaust, imprisonment, and the destruction caused by war such as Monuments at War 1943-45, the Allies, and damage to cultural heritage in Emilia Romagna. The exhibition path closes with the Hall of Names: on the walls and vaults, as in the Prague synagogue, 14,000 names of Italian deportees in Nazi concentration camps are inscribed. In the museum courtyard, the names of some Nazi concentration camps are engraved on sixteen multi-directional Steles, six meters high, in the form of funeral tombstones. In 1984, the Municipality of Carpi obtained from the State the concession of the area of the former Fossoli camp. Pending the implementation of a recovery project of the site, it is possible to visit what remains of the barracks, used until the 1960s, first occupied by the Nomadelfia community and then by the Julian and Dalmatian refugees.
Information about Museums of Palazzo dei Pio: Monument Museum to the Deported
Piazza dei Martiri, 68,
41012 Carpi (Modena)
059649955
musei@carpidiem.it
https://www.palazzodeipio.it
Source: MIBACT
