Greek And Latin In Chains
The Prison Graffiti of the Nazi Via Tasso Prison in Rome
A great villa, one of many, stands on the Esquiline Hill. Great families called it home: the Giustiniani, voracious art-collectors and eminent patrons of Carravagio and Borromini; and the Massimi, said to be descendants of Quintus Fabius Maximus and the rest of the ancient Roman gens Fabia. From these families would the villa receive its name: Villa Giustiniani Massimo. To its south sits the Papal Archbasilica of Saint John Lateran. The view from the east, at least originally, presented an endless glittering park of delicate wooded green hills. Urban expansion, however, consumed this primeval land and its ancient owners as a new Rome became the capital of a modern and unified Italy. The great villa, one of many, still stands on the Esquiline Hill. Great families once called it home, but no longer. And now, an eye facing east does not find a boundless expanse of bucolic green. What it finds next to the villa is something else. A place with no hills. A place with no trees or any green. A place with no windows. A place with no light. And for many, a place with no hope.
In 1931, something new rose out of the earth directly next to the Villa Giustiniani Massimo on the Via Torquato Tasso. The building had four floors, an attic, and a courtyard. Its founders were another great family: the Ruspoli; they had been Florentines who assimilated into Rome’s landed gentry through their ties with Pope Paul III. The Ruspoli sided with the papacy again, opposing the emerging Kingdom of Italy, in the final stages of the Risorgimento. Thereafter the Pope’s defeat and, as Pius IX called it, “imprisonment” within Vatican City made the Ruspoli and the pope’s other aristocratic allies the “black” families. Indeed, this blackened family’s new 1931 real estate would itself become something of darkness. Due east of this new Ruspoli complex sits the Villa Wolkonskj, a memento of the 19th-century whose grounds display some of the last vestiges of green in eastern Rome and whose halls once hosted the salon of a Bohemian Russian princess. The tenant of 1931, however, was the German government, which was using the villa for their embassy. To them, Francesco Ruspoli offered his new building on Via Tasso. Germany answered yes; it was a deal too good to pass up. And thereafter German mission in Rome used the complex as a benign cultural annex for their embassy next door. But there soon came to be no room for this cultural annex as the fault-lines of the world ruptured and unleashed another war.
The summer of 1943 saw that war’s Western theater shift from the Maghreb onto the opposite coast of the Mediterranean; the Allies were coming to Italy. The opening moves were made in Sicily, where in July that island’s beaches hosted a five-nation army of 160,000 men ferried from Africa by a fleet spanning sixty miles and carrying 100,000 tons of supplies. In sheer manpower, this force in Sicily stood 22 times larger than Athens’ doomed expedition to the island over twenty-three centuries earlier. Thirty-eight days of combat expelled the Axis from the island, and by September the Allies were ashore on the mainland skirting the ruins of Paestum and desperately fighting for every inch of their beachhead against German counterattacks at Salerno. The headlines for the Axis grew darker on 8 September: Italy was out of the war, or at least out the Axis war: the government of Marshal Badoglio, who had entered power after the imprisonment of Mussolini back in July, had switched to the Allied side.
Neither the message nor any sort of a plan seemed to reach most of the 1.7 million soldiers now courting a hostile German army. Six battalions of German paratroopers, the elite Fallschirmjager, swept into Rome from the south almost completely unopposed, except for pockets of desperate resistance at the Porta San Paolo, barely a stone’s throw from where both Keats and Shelley lie buried. Rome fell in a single day. Staring down at the city from their headquarters at Horace’s immortal mountain of Soracte, the Germans then executed their mop-up of the occupied peninsula through Operation ALARIC, named for the Germanic chieftain who had also seized Rome in a single day in 410 C.E. A new German military government entered the Eternal City, bringing the story back to the Via Tasso.
The German cultural annex of the pre-war years became the headquarters of Lieutenant Colonel Herbert Kappler, a cold and bitter SS man who carried a dueling scar on his cheek and who had become an enthusiast in Etruscan pottery after five years in the Eternal City. From Via Tasso, he was to hold authority over the entire security apparatus of Italy’s new German military government. One arm of his new command was the Sicherheitsdienst (SD), the Nazi Party’s intelligence agency, whose chief job was the detection and elimination of enemies within the Reich: partisans, dissidents, and the millions of ‘undesirables’ earmarked for death in the Holocaust. The civilian counterpart to the SD, and Kappler’s other chief weapon, was the Sicherheitspolizei (SP), whose ranks included the infamous Gestapo. With seemingly unlimited resources, Kappler began combating all traces of subversion in Rome. Clergy and laymen alike faced the firing squads, but they soon seemed to be the lucky ones. The cruelest of fates awaited those sent off to the black cells of the Via Tasso, where torturers stuck heads in vices, ripped out teeth, nails, and even mustaches, and scorched prisoners with blowtorches. It was at the Tasso where Rome’s Jews delivered 50 kilograms of gold in exchange for their lives; the Germans rounded them up anyway. It was from the Tasso where a fleet of meat-packing trucks carried 335 innocent Romans to their deaths at the Ardeatine Caves, in reprisal for 32 German soldiers killed by a bomb at the Via Rasella, barely a block from Piazza Barberini. The Tasso was a place one feared to see, pass, or even acknowledge in a hushed whisper.
In the abyss, however, scores of prisoners found some vestige of hope by composing graffiti on their cell walls. With whatever they had, be it metal nails or their own, prisoners carved out literary passages, prayers, messages for future inmates, or anything else to remove them from their suffering. While nearly all of these messages are in Italian, some prisoners decided to write in Latin and Greek. You can still see these messages today in the two preserved prison cells at the Museum of the Liberation of Rome, which sits in Kappler’s former headquarters. Pictures and transcriptions are below.
AETERNE EOS MEMENTOTE QUI PRO PATRIA MORTUI ERUNT — “Remember forever those who will have died for the fatherland.”
“Παντών κακῶν Κρόνος ἰατρὁς εστὶν”/”Time is the healer of all evils.” The spelling Κρόνος is used for Zeus’ Titan father. The Greek word for time is χρόνος. An easy mistake. I had to consult Apollonius to confirm this myself!
“Πἀντα ῤεί.”/”Everything flows.” This quote is a popular aphorism of Herakleitos, a 6th-century pre-Socratic philosopher. The words stress impermanence by referring to a metaphorical rushing river whose waters you cannot step in twice. An appropriate message from a prisoner in these walls, who knew that their imprisonment would likely not last forever. Inmates, indeed, often ended their sentences with death, sometimes en masse as part of German reprisals against partisan attacks.
The writer interestingly makes several mistakes here too. The correct form of ῥεῖ has rough aspiration and is accentuated with a circumflex, not a grave. Furthermore, their rendering of Ἡράκλειτος is not correct either; they misplace the accent, use the wrong letters, put the name in an entirely different declension, and again exchange the correct rough aspiration for smooth aspiration. After consulting with others, I attribute these mistakes to a hazy memory and perhaps no small amount of stress.
Gabe Kuhl holds a B.A. in Classics from Randolph College. He worked as a Rome Fellow with the Paideia Institute (2017–2018) and recently finished his service as a TEFL instructor in North Macedonia with the Peace Corps.
