Monumento alla Resistenza europea

On Como's lakeside gardens stands a memorial built of evidence rather than allegory: stones from Nazi extermination camps and from Hiroshima, beside the written last words of people condemned in the Second World War. Inaugurated in 1983 by President Pertini, it addresses every nation of the continent.

Why it matters

Most memorials to the Resistance speak in the local accent of national memory. This one was conceived as European from the start. Its designer, the Milanese artist Gianni Colombo, assembled stones from the sites of Nazi extermination camps and from the city of Hiroshima, so that the ground itself testifies across borders. The plaques along the paths carry writings left by the condemned of the Second World War, translated into seven languages: Italian, English, French, German, Russian, Japanese and Hebrew. When Sandro Pertini — President of the Republic, himself a partisan and once a prisoner of fascism — came to the inauguration on 28 May 1983, his presence signalled how much civic weight the city attached to the monument.

What to notice

The composition is architectural rather than figurative: three staircases lead up to large stone slabs, a form that casts the visitor as witness rather than spectator. The translated last writings of the condemned transform abstract statistics into individual voices, and the stones' documented provenance, camp grounds and Hiroshima, gives the ensemble the character of a reliquary of the European catastrophe. The monument's setting in the lakeside gardens contributes to its argument: peace was purchased at a human cost.

Context and history

The monument grew out of the postwar culture of remembrance that in Como, a city decorated for its Resistance, carried particular force. Construction began in the late 1970s and the work was completed and inaugurated on 28 May 1983 in the presence of Pertini, as both the municipal heritage portal and the encyclopaedic record agree. Gianni Colombo, already celebrated in the field of kinetic and environmental art, gave the memorial the spatial severity that distinguishes it from celebratory statuary of earlier generations. Como's own Resistance history, which cost the city deportations and reprisals, forms the local root of a monument deliberately widened to the European and global scale by the stones it gathered.