Mario Draghi decided to celebrate the feast of April 25, speaking and speaking in the symbolic place of the Nazi-Fascist occupation of Rome: the prison in via Tasso, where about two thousand opponents were imprisoned and tortured and which was subsequently transformed into the Historical Museum of Liberation of Rome.
It was the most atrocious of the places of “institutional” violence in Rome occupied by the Nazis, long in which bloody tortures were consumed: the Regina Coeli prison, the notorious “Oltremare” and “Iaccarino” guesthouses in Koch, the basement of Palazzo Braschi della Banda Bardi and Pollastrini, the barracks and the police stations.
Via Tasso was the most feared of that place because it was the only one totally in the hands of the SS of the Gestapo, where anti-fascists entered – to be interrogated and then massacred – but not fascists in uniform, generally despised by the Germans. The Romans in those years avoided pronouncing the name of via Tasso and rather said to themselves: «there, in S. Giovanni».
The one chosen by the SS was a large, anonymous building with a yellow-orange facade and made up of many 3-room apartments, intended for the Roman petty bourgeoisie and which were transformed into cells during the war. Several legendary and heroic figures passed through it in Rome, the city Gold Medal of the Resistance: among these the Colonel of the Engineers Giuseppe Cordero Lanza di Montezemolo, head of the clandestine Military Front, then shot in the Fosse Ardeatine, Giuliano Vassalli and Bruno Buozzi, shot the day of the Liberation of Rome and who in the 1920s had been leader of the socialist FIOM in Turin during the years of the occupation of the factories and who was destined to become general secretary of the CGIL.