Stumbling stones: where can you find them in Rome?

Every year on January 27th, the International Holocaust Remembrance Day commemorates the victims of Nazi violence – on the very day when the former Soviet army entered Auschwitz and revealed the horrors of the “Final Solution” to the entire world.

Italy paid an enormous price, in terms of human lives, and the recognition of what happened is particularly important in Rome, where the Jewish Ghetto was infamously raided by the German troops in 1943.

While Holocaust survivors and first-hand witnesses of the Nazi occupation are sadly leaving us, the local city council keeps setting up activities and events to, in the words of Primo Levi, “Never forget that this has happened“. Which brings us to the stolpersteine memorials, or stumbling stones, that are scattered throughout the city.

Stolpersteine: what’s in a word?

Stolperstein (singular) is a German term meaning literally “stumbling stone”. The Stolpersteine (plural!) project was launched by German artist Gunter Demnig in 1992 to remember the victims of deportation.

There are currently 75,000 stolpersteine all over Europe, the majority of which for persecuted Jewish, but Demnig also mapped out Romani, homosexuals, disabled victims as well as many other members of minorities that were targeted by the Nazi regime.

These bronze cubes are identical to our very own sanpietrini, the cobblestones that make out the most part of Roman streets in the city center, and have started appearing in Italy in 2010. As with any other location where Nazis hit, they are placed outside the last known place of residence/business of someone who was killed in the concntration camps or executed.

Where can you see stolpersteine/stumbling stones in Rome?

Whether you’re here visiting now or planning to, these reminders of lives torn apart are a different way to visit Rome, and because of their location, it can be a definite surprise to, well, stumble into a bronze block and discover that a certain street or piazza was the backdrop to a major history event.

Of course the majority of pietre d’inciampo, as they are called in Italian, can be found around the Synagogue and the alleys in the Jewish Ghetto, but you would be surprised to learn just how large and scattered that community was: you can see more of this “de-centralized” monument in the Monti area, in Trastevere, in the Piazza Bologna area, in the Prati neighborhood… A full list of stolpersteine in Rome is here (in Italian) or you can look at an interactive map below (but be aware that this was last updated in 2017):