MEMO4345: New Holocaust Museum Opens in Piedmont's Borgo San Dalmazzo

In Borgo San Dalmazzo, near Cuneo, the MEMO4345 Museum of Memory inaugurated in September 2021 inside the deconsecrated 17th-century church of Sant'Anna. The multimedia installation, designed by Studio Kuadra with EU funds, the Fondazione Cassa di Risparmio di Cuneo, and municipal contributions, commemorates the 357 deportees—334 of them foreigners—who crossed the Maritime Alps from Saint Martin Vésubie after September 8, 1943, fleeing Nazi occupation. Many were captured and deported from Borgo San Dalmazzo, one of four Italian concentration camps alongside Fossoli, Trieste, and Bolzano. The museum's content, largely researched by Adriana Muncinelli over decades, names the victims and includes an interactive screen revealing faces, origins, and escape routes of about 180 deportees. The focal point is Enrico Tealdi's 2011 work 'Ombre nella memoria,' a secular altar. Seven video narratives trace families like the Dreifuss, Schonbrunn, and Zylber. On November 21, 1943, the first convoy left for Drancy and Auschwitz; of 331 Piedmontese Jews, only 39 survived. The museum also honors 'Righteous' figures like Don Raimondo Viale, who saved hundreds of Jews. A quote from Walter Benjamin in the apse reads: 'It is more difficult to honor the memory of the nameless than that of the famous.'