ROME -- With competition from the monuments of Ancient and Christian Rome, it is not surprising that few tourists find time to visit the capital’s Museum of the Liberation in Via Tasso.

Used by the Gestapo as a prison for Resistance fighters and political prisoners during World War II, some of its cramped, windowless cells still bear the graffiti scratched by wartime inmates.

Prisoners survived on one meal a day – a thin vegetable soup and two 100-gram slices of bread – and were routinely tortured.
A haven of unhappy memories, the Via Tasso Museum has become a symbol of Italy’s historical forgetfulness and inability to agree on the narrative of its recent past.
An announcement by the Culture Ministry that it was cutting funding for this year by 15 percent, from euros 50,000 to 41,000, placed a question-mark over the institution’s survival.

Since raising the alarm earlier this year, the museum’s administrators have turned to local government institutions to take up the slack.

The city of Rome and the region are both run by former neo-fascists, who might be thought to have little enthusiasm for the Liberation theme.

In reality, they have both responded promptly. The city has already paid over an annual grant of euros 10,000 and the region has agreed to provide the same amount for English-language guides to replace the primitive photocopies currently handed out at the entrance.

The provincial government, headed by an ostensibly sympathetic leftist, is still negotiating an agreement to fund maintenance and refurbishment over the next three years.
Nicola Zingaretti, the president of the province of Rome, chose a photographic celebration of the Liberation as a way of marking the 150th anniversary of Italian unity.
"Recalling those events over sixty-five years on means keeping the memory alive of men and women who fought for the moral and material revival of our country," Zingaretti wrote in a presentation of the rare colour photographs taken by British and American military photographers and on display in the province’s Palazzo Valentini headquarters.

"This memory takes on special significance in the year we celebrate the first one hundred and fifty years of Italian unity," he added.
Unfortunately for Italy, the country has had considerable difficulty in uniting on the value of its own unity, and encounters similar problems in agreeing on the importance of the Resistance.

From being the founding myth of the post-war republic, the Resistance has been questioned by revisionist historians, who highlight the reprisal killings at the end of the war and the massacre of suspected fascist sympathizers by Yugoslav partisans in the Foibe, deep crevices into which hundreds – and possibly thousands – were thrown.
The revisionism and forgetfulness gathered pace as supporters of the far right achieved positions of power at local and national level.

Giuseppe Mogavero, secretary-general of the Via Tasso Museum, is indignant at recent legislative proposals by MPs from Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi’s People of Freedom Party (PDL) that equate anti-fascist partisans with the veterans of Benito Mussolini’s last-stand Republic of Salo.

PDL deputies have proposed that Salo veterans should be paid state pensions, just like Resistance fighters, and that if Italian soldiers deported to concentration camps in Germany are awarded commemorative medals, then there should be a similar medal for fascist fighters.

"We can’t take an official position on behalf of the museum, but on a personal level we can. Of course we’re critical," said Mr Mogavero.

Enthusiasm for the commemoration of events in the history of the Resistance follows a leopard-skin pattern across the city, depending on the political colour of the local administrators.

While some on the far right might be hostile, the prevailing sentiment among Mr Berlusconi’s supporters is indifference.

"Berlusconi doesn’t participate. He’s not interested," Mr Mogavero said.

"Everything takes us back to Via Rasella," he said, referring to the controversial Resistance attack on SS soldiers that provoked the Ardeatine Caves massacre of 335 men and boys in reprisal. "There’s no consensus of memory."

While struggling to keep memory alive – Via Tasso receives more than 10,000 visits from school-children every year – the museum risks becoming a symbol of Italy’s mutilated memory.

On the second floor a glass case containing historic documents has broken and a piece of tape, which looks as though it has been there for years, warns of the danger.
In a third floor cell one can just about make out the graffiti scratched on the wall by J. Lloyd of the British Army, including a bold Union Jack planted on the top of a hill.
But the rest of the room is in darkness: the light-bulb has gone.

The museum celebrates many examples of heroism, as well as of horror. A graffito on the second floor exhorts fellow prisoners: "Have faith and courage. No sacrifice for an idea is in vain."

There are accounts of the systematic persecution of the Jews, expelled from schools, state and professional life under the 1938 race laws.

More than 2000 Roman Jews perished in the Nazi extermination camps. Though many were sheltered by sympathetic Italians and by the Catholic Church, some were betrayed in return for a 5,000 Lire reward and those who harboured them risked the death penalty.

Many Italians would probably be gratified to read SS commander Herbert Kappler’s report on an operation to round up Roman Jews on October 18 1943.

Italian police were not invited to cooperate, given the Germans’ "absolute lack of confidence" in them for such a role.

Kappler lamented, in the document on display on the third floor, the Italian population’s attitude of passive resistance, "which in a large number of individual cases became active assistance" to the victims.

In one case, he wrote, German police were denied access to a Jewish home by a fascist in a black shirt, who presented them with an official document and blocked the door.
Other British servicemen incarcerated in Via Tasso include a Howard Phillips and a "Captain John Armstrong".

The latter was among 14 prisoners killed by the Germans at La Storta on June 4 1944. Originally identified simply as an "unknown Englishman", he eventually turned out to have been a Hungarian Jew, Gabor Adler, caught while working for Britain’s Special Operations Executive (SOE) in Sardinia.

"Via Tasso shows what life was like under the Nazis and the Italian fascists," said Harry Shindler, a spokesman for the Italy Star Association, which represents British veterans of the Italian campaign.

"It is sad for Italy when there is a question over the future of places like this, especially when parliament is considering proposals to abrogate the law banning the reconstitution of the Fascist Party and to place Salo veterans and partisans on a level of equality," said Mr Shindler, who participated in the Anzio landings.

"We Brits have a connection with Via Tasso, so we have a right to speak out."

Mr Shindler said Italy hasn’t faced up to its past in the way Germany has and lamented the fact that fascist memorabilia was widely on sale, despite being illegal.

"Italy hasn’t come to terms with its past. Until it does, it will never be a normal country," he said.