Resistances

Abstract

Massimo Uffreduzzi. My memory of that event is that on the twenty-third of March [the anniversary of the founding of the Fascist movement] the Germans had denied [the Fascists] permission to hold a demonstration, a spectacle, so to speak, in the streets. [Therefore the celebration] was being held in the Corporations’ building in via Veneto. Which was then the headquarters of the Fascist Party. And while this ceremony was in progress, we heard the explosion, very clearly. We were, in a straight line, very close. So, all out, all rushing to see what was the matter; and we reached the place and I saw people, who were being held by the Germans against the railings of Palazzo Barberini, with their hands up … Surely the sight was not easy to describe, because the sight of these bodies torn to pieces, these thirty-three, thirty-two … I mean, it was unbelievable. I looked down via Rasella and pulled right back because it … it hurt me, I guess. Then, with others, we went through via del Tritone, those little streets around there. We heard nothing, and found no trace of the perpetrators. After which we went back to the Corporations’ building and there I remember, in a whole other key, we held the commemoration of March 23, all deeply stricken, badly shocked, over this thing. I began to feel a state of overexcitement, a state also of fear in a sense, because it was the first time that an attack like that was staged in Rome, in the very center of Rome.