The ethical imperative of "Mai Più": Why we visit sites of tragedy

This memorial has been created over the ossuary in Sant'Anna.

Sometimes I wonder about myself. This week, Lucy and I visited the museum at Sant’Anna di Stazzema, where 560 civilians were slaughtered during the waning days of WW2. In previous years, we paid our respects to the 770 victims of a similar slaughter in Marzabotto and another 174 in the Padule di Fucecchio. We have now visited the sites of three of the four worst massacres in Italy that occurred in 1944.

I’m not a morbid person, yet I feel strangely drawn to these sites. Is there something wrong with me? I don’t think so. I just don’t want to forget how fragile peace, democracy, and human decency are. Reading the engraved names of the victims, looking at their pictures, and hearing the details of these tragedies is my way of refusing to let the perpetrators succeed in erasing those people from history. It’s a way to show respect for the victims—to say that their lives were valued.

In this church courtyard, civilians were
rounded
up and machine-gunned to death.

Yes, we were horrified to see the photos of the victims, most of them women, children, and the elderly. The able-bodied Italian men had fled into the hills, thinking that the German soldiers were just coming to round up workers and force them into labor camps to shore up the crumbling Gothic Line. Instead, members of the 16th SS Panzergrenadier Division surrounded the village, rounded up the remaining villagers, and locked them in barns and stables before systematically gunning them down or throwing hand grenades into cellars. Over 110 children were slaughtered. The youngest victim, Anna Pardini, was only 20 days old. After the executions, the troops used gasoline to burn the bodies.

Eight pregnant women who were killed at Sant'Anna di Stazzema.

Eight pregnant women were among those killed, including Evelina Berretti. She was in labor when SS soldiers entered the hamlet. According to survivor testimonies and forensic documentation later used in military trials, she was brutally murdered, and her unborn child was intentionally targeted and killed separately. Another young mother whose story is intimately tied to the horror of that day is Genny Bibolotti Marsili. While she was not pregnant, she became a central symbol of the massacre’s human cost. Trapped by the SS, she used her final moments to hide her six-year-old son, Mario, behind a chimney structure, throwing one of her wooden clogs at a soldier to distract him just before she was shot. Her sacrifice saved her son.

Antonio Tucci lost his wife and
eight children. What unimaginable
sorrow!

In the years that followed, Mario became one of the primary living testimonies, regularly guiding groups through the very mountains where he lost his family. When people asked him why he would relive his trauma, he explained that he viewed his survival not as a privilege, but as a job. His mother died so he could speak, and his life’s purpose became looking young generations in the eyes to show them the human cost of hatred, ensuring that her sacrifice would serve the cause of peace.

I've read that some people come
to these monuments and read 
aloud every name, to honor 
the memory of the victims.

Another survivor, Enrico Pieri, was only ten years old when he hid in a barn and watched Nazi soldiers murder his entire family. He spent his adult life working tirelessly for European reconciliation. Pieri fiercely believed that remembering tragedy was not about harboring bitterness, but about actively constructing a peaceful future. He frequently spoke to school groups, channeling his grief into education.

“We must remember, but we must not hate,” Pieri said. “Hate leads to more hate. We must teach the young generations about what happened here so they can build a Europe of peace, solidarity, and brotherhood.”

James E. Young, a renowned cultural historian and professor emeritus who spent decades studying Holocaust and wartime memorials, wrote that the true value of a memorial is the interaction between the visitor and the space. When a human walks through a site, the victims are restored from abstract statistics into individual lives.

“The memorial path is a path of return,” Young said. “The monument is a placeholder for memory, but the memory itself must be generated by the visitor.”

If that is so, the museum and monuments at Sant’Anna and the other sites we’ve visited are doing exactly what their creators intended. When looking into the history of these Italian massacres, I worried a visit would offer only despair. But in reading the words of the survivors who built these Peace Parks, I realized these spaces aren’t meant to keep us trapped in grief. They are designed to re-sensitize us.

The Italian phrase “Mai Più” is used constantly at these peace parks. While a phrase like “Never Forget” looks entirely backward toward mourning, Mai Più—never again—looks forward as an ethical imperative. And it is this hopeful perspective, I believe, that draws me again and again to these sites.

Sant'Anna di Stazzema was right on the edge of the Linea Gottica--the Gothic Line of defense (it's the line that looks kind of like a train track).