Gold of Rome | |
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Directed by | Carlo Lizzani |
Cinematography | Erico Menczer |
Edited by | Franco Fraticelli |
Music by | Giovanni Fusco |
L'oro di Roma (internationally released as Gold of Rome) is a 1961 Italian war - drama film directed by Carlo Lizzani. [1] The film is based on actual events surrounding the Nazi's raid of Rome's Jewish ghetto in October 1943. [2]
After the Italian armistice, the Germans occupy Rome; in October 1943, the German police commander calls the president of the Jewish community before him and orders him to deliver 50 kilograms of gold within two days, otherwise he will take 200 heads of families hostage. The community is divided between those who decide to give in to the blackmail and hand over what little gold they have left and those who do not believe in the Germans' word. The Jews remaining in the ghetto are impoverished by the Italian racial laws and with enormous difficulty try to come up with the imposed amount.
The president of the community does what he can to ask for aid, distressed and uncertain that the delivery will really help save lives. A group of boys arms themselves to rebel, headed by young shoemaker David. His decision not to deliver the gold and oppose Nazi power leads him to clash with most members of the community and the precept of refusing violence. Giulia, a former classmate of David's Israelite school, at first appears to be able to escape racial segregation, thanks to her requited love for Maximus, a Catholic medical student. Determined to marry, Julia is baptized, divided in her love for her roots. In fact, when despite the successful delivery of the 50 kilos of gold, the Germans round up Jews all over Rome, taking away men, women, the sick and children, she voluntarily surrenders herself into the hands of the Germans, to follow her father and his people.
A ghetto is a part of a city in which members of a minority group are concentrated, especially as a result of political, social, legal, religious, environmental or economic pressure. Ghettos are often known for being more impoverished than other areas of the city. Versions of such restricted areas have been found across the world, each with their own names, classifications, and groupings of people.
The Roman Ghetto or Ghetto of Rome was a Jewish ghetto established in 1555 in the Rione Sant'Angelo, in Rome, Italy, in the area surrounded by present-day Via del Portico d'Ottavia, Lungotevere dei Cenci, Via del Progresso and Via di Santa Maria del Pianto, close to the River Tiber and the Theatre of Marcellus. With the exception of brief periods under Napoleon from 1808 to 1815 and under the Roman Republics of 1798–99 and 1849, the ghetto of Rome was controlled by the papacy until the capture of Rome in 1870.
The history of the Jews in Italy spans more than two thousand years to the present. The Jewish presence in Italy dates to the pre-Christian Roman period and has continued, despite periods of extreme persecution and expulsions, until the present. As of 2019, the estimated core Jewish population in Italy numbers around 45,000.
The Great Synagogue of Rome is an Orthodox Jewish congregation and synagogue, that is located at Lungotevere de' Cenci, in Rome, in Lazio, Italy. Designed by Vincenzo Costa and Osvaldo Armanni in an eclectic mix of Historicism and Art Nouveau styles, the synagogue was completed in 1904. It is the largest synagogue in Rome.
Rome, Open City, also released as Open City, is a 1945 Italian neorealist war drama film directed by Roberto Rossellini and co-written by Sergio Amidei, Celeste Negarville and Federico Fellini. Set in Rome in 1944, the film follows a diverse group of characters coping under the Nazi occupation, and centers on a Resistance fighter trying to escape the city with the help of a Catholic priest. The title refers to the status of Rome as an open city following its declaration as such on 14 August 1943. The film is the first in Rosselini's "Neorealist Trilogy", followed by Paisan (1946) and Germany, Year Zero (1948).
Sant'Angelo is the 11th rione of Rome, Italy, located in Municipio I. Often written as rione XI - Sant'Angelo, it has a coat of arms with an angel on a red background, holding a palm branch in its left hand. In another version, the angel holds a sword in its right hand and a scale in its left.
Beginning with the invasion of Poland during World War II, the Nazi regime set up ghettos across German-occupied Eastern Europe in order to segregate and confine Jews, and sometimes Romani people, into small sections of towns and cities furthering their exploitation. In German documents, and signage at ghetto entrances, the Nazis usually referred to them as Jüdischer Wohnbezirk or Wohngebiet der Juden, both of which translate as the Jewish Quarter. There were several distinct types including open ghettos, closed ghettos, work, transit, and destruction ghettos, as defined by the Holocaust historians. In a number of cases, they were the place of Jewish underground resistance against the German occupation, known collectively as the ghetto uprisings.
The history of the Jewish community of Venice, the capital of the Veneto region of Italy, has been well known since the medieval era.
Carlo Lizzani was an Italian film director, screenwriter and critic.
Andrea Checchi was a prolific Italian film actor.
Anna Maria Ferrero was an Italian actress.
Paola Borboni was an Italian stage and film actress whose career spanned nearly eight decades of cinema.
Delegation for the Assistance of Jewish Emigrants or DELASEM, was an Italian and Jewish resistance organization that worked in Italy between 1939 and 1947. It is estimated that during World War II, DELASEM was able to distribute more than $1,200,000 in aid, of which nearly $900,000 came from outside Italy.
The Hunchback of Rome is a 1960 Italian crime-drama film directed by Carlo Lizzani. It is loosely based on the real life events of Giuseppe Albano, an Italian partisan that was involved in the Roman Resistance against German occupation between 1943 and 1945.
The list of the A hundred Italian films to be saved was created with the aim to report "100 films that have changed the collective memory of the country between 1942 and 1978". Film preservation, or film restoration, describes a series of ongoing efforts among film historians, archivists, museums, cinematheques, and non-profit organizations to rescue decaying film stock and preserve the images they contain. In the widest sense, preservation assures that a movie will continue to exist in as close to its original form as possible.
The Holocaust in Italy was the persecution, deportation, and murder of Jews between 1943 and 1945 in the Italian Social Republic, the part of the Kingdom of Italy occupied by Nazi Germany after the Italian surrender on 8 September 1943, during World War II.
The raid on the Roman Ghetto took place on 16 October 1943. A total of 1,259 people, mainly members of the Jewish community—numbering 363 men, 689 women, and 207 children—were detained by the Gestapo. Of these detainees, 1,023 were identified as Jews and deported to the Auschwitz concentration camp. Of these deportees, only fifteen men and one woman survived.
The Jewish Museum of Rome is situated in the basement of the Great Synagogue of Rome and offers both information on the Jewish presence in Rome since the second century BCE and a large collection of works of art produced by the Jewish community. A visit to the museum includes a guided tour of the Great Synagogue and of the smaller Spanish Synagogue in the same complex.
Stolpersteine is the German name for small, cobble stone-sized memorials installed all over Europe by German artist Gunter Demnig. They remember the fate of the victims of Nazi Germany being murdered, deported, exiled or driven to suicide. The first Stolperstein in Genoa, the capital of the Italian region of Liguria, was installed in January 2012.
The RSI Police Order No. 5 was an order issued on 30 November 1943 in the Italian Social Republic to the Italian police in German-occupied northern Italy to arrest all Jews except those born of mixed marriages, which were required to be monitored by the police.