Pietre d'Inciampo (Stolpersteine)

Set flush into the pavements of Acqui Terme's old town, small brass-topped stones carry the names, birth dates and fates of local people deported by the Nazi-fascist regime. Part of Gunter Demnig's Europe-wide Stolpersteine project, they place remembrance at the homes associated with the city's lost neighbours.

Why it matters

Most war memorials gather names in one place. The Stolpersteine do the opposite: they scatter remembrance across the city, one stone at the threshold of the building where each victim last lived freely. In Acqui Terme the stones form part of the municipal Jewish heritage project, Acqui Judaica, connecting the town's streets to the history of 1943–44, when the Shoah destroyed a community that had lived here since the late fifteenth century. Their brass inscriptions restore individual identities to people whom deportation reduced to numbers.

What to notice

Each stone is a cube of porphyry about the size of a Rome sanpietrino, capped with a hand-inscribed brass plate. The inscription follows the European format: the person's name, year of birth, date of deportation, and the place and date of death, where known. The stones are distributed among addresses in the historic centre. Several family surnames repeat, including Bachi, De Benedetti and Ottolenghi, listed by the municipal portal among the town's historic Jewish families. Their setting in ordinary pavement is part of the memorial's conception. The municipal page quotes scholar Paolo De Benedetti: "to forget a name is to make die"; eleven names are set into the city itself.

Context and history

The Stolpersteine ("stumbling stones") project was conceived by the Berlin artist Gunter Demnig, who laid the first stone in Cologne in the 1990s and has since placed tens of thousands of them across more than twenty European countries, always personally installing each stone at a victim's last freely chosen address. The municipal portal describes the project as a monumental European work of diffuse memory and records the Acqui Terme stones as part of local Jewish heritage. The names it records — Roberto Ancona; Arturo Enrico, Aldo, Michele and Avito Bachi; Elisa and Ernesta De Benedetti; Enrichetta Ghiron; Dorina Ottolenghi; Smeralda Dina Ede; Tesaura Vigevani — belong to the Shoah's Italian chapter, when deportation emptied communities such as Acqui's, which had numbered several hundred members in the nineteenth century and dissolved in 1952. Each stone marks a former home, preserving a record of the old town's social geography before 1943.