Largo 16 Ottobre 1943

The square is named for 16 October 1943. Between 5.30 in the morning and two in the afternoon, SS and German order police, working from a census taken years earlier by the Fascist government, arrested 1,259 people here and in the surrounding streets, 689 women, 363 men and 207 children. Weeks earlier the community had been made to hand over fifty kilograms of gold against a promise of safety, and had done so. After foreign nationals and members of mixed families were released, 1,023 people were deported to Auschwitz; sixteen came back. The plaque in the square records 2,091 Roman Jews deported over the whole of the German occupation, of whom 101 returned. Of the 335 people killed at the Fosse Ardeatine on 24 March 1944, seventy-five belonged to the Roman Jewish community.