Casa della Resistenza e Parco della Memoria e della Pace

Where the Toce river meets Lake Maggiore, this memorial complex marks the ground where Nazi-fascist forces shot captive partisans in June 1944. It combines a documentation centre, a specialist library and a memorial wall bearing the names of local victims of the struggle for liberation, and supports historical research through its archives.

Why it matters

The Casa della Resistenza stands on the site of the Fondotoce execution, one of the harshest reprisals in the Verbano during the German occupation. It is both a place of mourning and a working institute: its association maintains archives, a photographic collection and a library dedicated to the Resistance and contemporary history, and it is embedded in the regional network of memory institutions with support from the Piedmont Region. Its historical focus includes the partisan war in the nearby Val Grande mountains and the persecution of Jews around Lake Maggiore in 1943.

What to notice

The memorial wall bears the names of more than 1,200 people from the area who died for freedom and democracy. The surrounding Park of Memory and Peace frames it near the lakeshore. The centre's documentation addresses the Fondotoce and Baveno massacres and the Lake Maggiore massacres of 1943, when Jewish families on the western shore were targeted. The library, named for Aldo Aniasi, holds books, digital collections and archival holdings. Repeated surnames on the wall reflect families who lost several members.

Context and history

On the afternoon of 20 June 1944, partisans arrested during German round-up operations in the Val Grande — the wild mountain area inland from Verbania — were shot at Fondotoce in reprisal; the official site of the Casa della Resistenza records the victims' number as forty-three, and the memorial is widely known as the memorial of the fallen for freedom and democracy, while some commemorations speak of the forty-two martyrs. The documentation centre itself is a postwar creation: purpose-built on the execution ground and inaugurated in the 1990s, it was designed by architect and former partisan Cesare Mercandino according to the memorial's own institutional accounts. Since then the association has expanded the site into a study centre with a library, photographic archive and databases, and publishes the journal Nuova Resistenza Unita. The complex also commemorates Cleonice Tomassetti, the schoolteacher who was the only woman shot at Fondotoce that afternoon.