By Giulio D'Ercole - www.romephotofuntours.com
Today, for the International Holocaust Remembrance Day, I want to dedicate this blog to a very particular topic. During the photographic tours of Rome Photo Fun Tours, I often take foreign photographers to the Jewish Ghetto of Rome, where I dedicate a special stop to Stunt Stones (Pietre di inciampo in Italian) by Gunther Demnig. Starting in Cologne, this German artist began to set up small brass plates on stone blocks on the pavement in front of the houses of the victims of the Holocaust, on which he engraved the phrase "Here he lived ...". the name of the victim, the date and place of birth, that of his/her deportation to a Nazi concentration camp and the date of his/her death or disappearance. These stones are used to remind passers-by of the horror of recent history through a "small" but effective memorial to the memory that comes from below, from everyday life, from physical and family places, from the thresholds of those houses from which millions of Jews were violently abducted. To date, the artist has installed over 56,000, many in Italy too.
In December 2018 some of these stones were plucked from the ground with a barbaric gesture of anti-Semitic origin. On January 15th 2019, twenty new stones were replaced, instead of those stolen, showing the city, the nation and the whole world that Rome does not accept and does not forgive racist and anti-Semitic acts or ideologies.
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