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Palgrave Studies in Oral History
The Order Has Been Carried Out: History, Memory, and Meaning of a Nazi Massacre in Rome
Winner of the 2005 Oral History Association Book Award
On March 24, 1944, Nazi occupation forces in Rome killed 335 unarmed civilians in retaliation for a partisan attack the day before. Alessandro Portelli has crafted an eloquent, multi-voiced oral history of the massacre, of its background and its aftermath. The moving stories of the victims, the women and children who survived and carried on, the partisans who fought the Nazis, and the common people who lived through the tragedies of the war together paint a many-hued portrait of one of the world's most richly historical cities.
The Order Has Been Carried Out powerfully relates the struggles for freedom under Fascism and Nazism, the battles for memory in post-war democracy, and the meanings of death and grief in modern society.
On March 24, 1944, Nazi occupation forces in Rome killed 335 unarmed civilians in retaliation for a partisan attack the day before. Alessandro Portelli has crafted an eloquent, multi-voiced oral history of the massacre, of its background and its aftermath. The moving stories of the victims, the women and children who survived and carried on, the partisans who fought the Nazis, and the common people who lived through the tragedies of the war together paint a many-hued portrait of one of the world's most richly historical cities.
The Order Has Been Carried Out powerfully relates the struggles for freedom under Fascism and Nazism, the battles for memory in post-war democracy, and the meanings of death and grief in modern society.
344 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1999
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223 people want to read
About the author
Alessandro Portelli
63 books17 followersAlessandro Portelli, nato a Roma nel 1942, è considerato tra i fondatori della storia orale. Professore di Letteratura angloamericana all’Università «La Sapienza» di Roma, ha fondato e presiede il circolo Gianni Bosio per la conoscenza critica e la presenza alternativa delle culture popolari. Collabora con la Casa della Memoria e della Storia di Roma e con «il manifesto», «Liberazione» e «l’Unità».
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Displaying 1 - 16 of 16 reviews
January 31, 2014
L'immediata e crudele rappresaglia nazista, che seguì l'attentato di Via Rasella, a Roma nel 1944, è stata oggetto di discussioni infinite, oltre che di atti giudiziari al termine del conflitto. Questo libro l'analizza con equilibrio, basandosi sulle testimonianze vive dei romani (citate alla lettera e documentate), nonché sulla cospicua mole di pubblicazioni in merito. Contribuisce a sedare certe polemiche ancora vive, fatti alla mano. Non orienterà il giudizio basato su passione e/o dolore, ma certamente chiarisce in modo indubitabile i fatti, e la stretta cronologia. A beneficio, almeno, della verità storica.
April 13, 2021
“The Order Has Been Carried Out” is an amazing work of oral history and a case study of how memory can become politicized over time. In an effort to correct the collective memory surrounding the massacre at Fosse di Ardeatine, Portelli crafts a master work in the use of oral history. I would consider this work a required read for all aspiring historians and especially those that intend to collect and/or use oral interviews.
December 21, 2025
Can we forge memory into a weapon? Historians have wondered. For readers of the English translation of Alessandro Portelli’s The Order Has Been Carried Out: History, Memory and Meaning of a Nazi Massacre in Rome (2003), there is no doubt about it: of course we can. Such undertakings are not the sole purview of the political right. It is the questions that follow the “yes” around which Portelli structures the book, however, that carry the necessary doubts that catalyze memory into an active process: who forges the weapon, and for what purpose? What kind of weapon is it, and who will wield it? And can we forego the forging altogether – or perhaps forge memory into something other than a weapon?
Portelli provides ample answers, none definitive, in a book that centers and synthesizes the perspectives of the hundreds of people affected, in a dizzying variety of ways, by the Fosse Ardeatine massacre. (The number of people affected is plausibly in the thousands, Portelli explains, due to Rome’s central location, and the extensive family ties of hundreds of victims, but an oral history with thousands of perspectives is both hardly achievable and not what this book is.) He is not shy to deploy transcript excerpts of interviews -- some integrated into the main body of text and some apart from it, most from Portelli’s original interviews and some from transcripts half a century prior -- to illustrate points he wants to make. Yet this does not preclude him from deploying interview transcripts for arguments the narrators wish to make, cutting against the grain of Portelli’s own arguments. It is a feat to have crafted a read as balanced as it is harrowing.
Aside from doubt, the most important catalyzing element in forging memory into an active process in Portelli’s book is the human ability to create and maintain relationships. Portelli talks of relationships of the past to the present, of people's past selves to their present ones, of narrators to the interviewer; relationships of solidarity between family members of the victims/martyrs/heroes killed at the Fosse Ardeatine; relationships of antagonism between families of victims of Via Rasella attack and the Fosse Ardeatine massacre carried out in reprisal for it. There is also, of course, the central relationship of antagonism between the right-wing Berlusconi government and the coalition of bearers of “un-corrupted” memories of the massacre: the families of those killed at Fosse Ardeatine, some of the heroes of the communist resistance (including those responsible for the attack at Via Rasella), and, of course, Portelli himself.
Portelli gathers his hundreds of interviews in large part to contest the widespread myths around how Romans (and Italians) remember the massacre at the Fosse Ardeatine and its relation to the attack at Via Rasella. “Ironically,” he writes, “the memory of Nazi massacres in Italy has prompted countrymen of the victims, citizens of the wounded and victimized country, to go out of their way to invent excuses of their oppressors and executioners… The very fact that so many people believe that the Germans acted otherwise than they did indicates that the German rationale for the reprisal [for Via Rasella] is inconceivable to many ordinary people, who therefore are ready to accept or invent narratives that make the ‘absurd’ more understandable and reasonable” (157-159). In other words, Portelli is talking about myths -- constructed, in this case, to make explicable unfathomable violence. There is the myth that the German reprisal for the Via Rasella attack occurred after a search for the communist partisans responsible for the latter; the myth that the Germans asked the partisans to turn themselves in and gave them ample time to do so; and that the partisans didn't turn themselves in, thereby carrying the greater share of the responsibility for the massacre lies with those who carried out the attack at Via Rasella. Portelli attacks each myth with aplomb, demonstrating through well-placed citations of existing secondary literature, and through interviews of some who carried out the Via Rasella attack, the nature of each as myth, and, through several interviews of affected families, the functions each myth serves. For him, The Order Has Been Carried Out is an avenue for a multi-perspective, non-linear story to be told, and in his facilitation of its telling, he wishes to make the avenue an open street, perhaps named for each of the 335 victims, which leads somewhere other than to, “the vision of yesterday's losers [and] the discourse of today's winners, the common sense of the new majority… [a majority that] delegates to the Right the concepts of country, honor, faith, death, and sacrifice” (250-251). In this sense, then, another part of Portelli’s project is to restore to popular memory of contemporary Italians the heroism, the faith, the deaths, and the sacrifices of the political Left of the war era – including that of the communist partisans of the Resistance in Rome itself, of the people responsible for the attack at Via Rasella.
For Portelli seeks to contest the “historical revisionism that challenged the meaning of the Resistance as the foundation of the Italian state” (12) as well as the post-1991 normalization of the ex-Fascist right in the mainstream of Italian politics. He says: “...the road that led to the acceptance of the ex-Fascists in the Center-Right coalition that won the elections in 1994 and again in a landslide in 2001… began at the Fosse Ardeatine” (252). His oral history is both an unearthing of this road and an attempt to reconstruct and redirect it: to build a new kind of memory and to disseminate it. His tool to do so – plausibly read as a weapon – is the many stories he facilitates, bound together in one book. The story is not a deadly super-weapon to vanquish foes in one swift, decapitating maneuver; it is the tool of working people, a sturdy shovel or hammer, for long-term, daily use. Decimating memory roads, and the laying of new ones, is grueling, unending work. Perhaps his book could be understood a foundational brick, or whatever material roads are built from. Or, in his own words: “These stories function as the tool that allows us to reconstruct the struggle over memory, to explore the relation between material facts and personal subjectivity, and to perceive the multiple, mutable ways of elaborating on and facing death” (15).
My identification with the political aims of The Order Has Been Carried Out is so total that I cannot bring myself to find anything in Portelli’s approach that I could plausibly call a drawback. Perhaps there are problematic elements – several of which he himself deems to be so – of which I can point to one, that I nevertheless find profoundly moving. In what he describes as “the highest moment in the Priebke trial,” Portelli writes of Giulia Spizzichino refusing to separate the seven relatives she lost in the attack at Via Rasella from the partisans who carried it out:
“… she goes on proudly: ‘Actually, I wish I could say that they were fighting to liberate Rome, unjustly called ‘the open city.’ I cannot take this credit…’ the brothers Di Consiglio were not part of the Resistance. They are part of it now, thanks to the conscience and the memory of those who lived to remember them” (198).
Here Portelli aligns Spizzichino’s testimony with his own aims – of not delegating heroism and sacrifice to the political right – and broadens the scope to whom heroism and sacrifice is to be restored. In this integrative maneuver, Giulia Spizzichino’s sacrifice are the relatives she lost; her heroism, her honor and faith, lie in the way she remembers her family: publicly and politically.
In a later section, Portelli speaks of how “[t]he real heroes of this new [post-1990 right-Wing historical] narrative are the ones in the middle, the ones who did nothing, the prototypes of a citizenry no longer participant (as projected in the post-war Constitution, now discredited and under attack) but, as the new buzz word has it, governable” (251, emphasis mine). In his book, Portelli positions his narrators, Giulia Spizzichino among them, in direct contrast to this new prototype of a “real hero.” His narrators, as he is himself, are participant citizens, joining one another to do something: to remember, to raise hell if need be; to tell their stories together.
P.S. It's impossible to read this and not think about Palestinian resistance fighters in Gaza, their attack on October 7th, and the discourses around them pushed by pro-Israel people. The exceptional, surprisingly successful guerrilla action against an occupying force, the bad-faith invocations of the civilians it killed, the insistence that the guerrillas should "just turn themselves in," the horrifying reprisal that punishes the city and its population, obviously to an insanely greater degree in Gaza, the puncturing of the myth of the invulnerability of the occupier...
If you have any, *any* sympathy for the armed action at via Rosella -- of an attempt to not let the fascist occupiers act with impunity, to liberate "gray" rome under the metal boot of constant violence -- the actions of Hamas on October 7th cannot appear as anything but righteous.
Portelli provides ample answers, none definitive, in a book that centers and synthesizes the perspectives of the hundreds of people affected, in a dizzying variety of ways, by the Fosse Ardeatine massacre. (The number of people affected is plausibly in the thousands, Portelli explains, due to Rome’s central location, and the extensive family ties of hundreds of victims, but an oral history with thousands of perspectives is both hardly achievable and not what this book is.) He is not shy to deploy transcript excerpts of interviews -- some integrated into the main body of text and some apart from it, most from Portelli’s original interviews and some from transcripts half a century prior -- to illustrate points he wants to make. Yet this does not preclude him from deploying interview transcripts for arguments the narrators wish to make, cutting against the grain of Portelli’s own arguments. It is a feat to have crafted a read as balanced as it is harrowing.
Aside from doubt, the most important catalyzing element in forging memory into an active process in Portelli’s book is the human ability to create and maintain relationships. Portelli talks of relationships of the past to the present, of people's past selves to their present ones, of narrators to the interviewer; relationships of solidarity between family members of the victims/martyrs/heroes killed at the Fosse Ardeatine; relationships of antagonism between families of victims of Via Rasella attack and the Fosse Ardeatine massacre carried out in reprisal for it. There is also, of course, the central relationship of antagonism between the right-wing Berlusconi government and the coalition of bearers of “un-corrupted” memories of the massacre: the families of those killed at Fosse Ardeatine, some of the heroes of the communist resistance (including those responsible for the attack at Via Rasella), and, of course, Portelli himself.
Portelli gathers his hundreds of interviews in large part to contest the widespread myths around how Romans (and Italians) remember the massacre at the Fosse Ardeatine and its relation to the attack at Via Rasella. “Ironically,” he writes, “the memory of Nazi massacres in Italy has prompted countrymen of the victims, citizens of the wounded and victimized country, to go out of their way to invent excuses of their oppressors and executioners… The very fact that so many people believe that the Germans acted otherwise than they did indicates that the German rationale for the reprisal [for Via Rasella] is inconceivable to many ordinary people, who therefore are ready to accept or invent narratives that make the ‘absurd’ more understandable and reasonable” (157-159). In other words, Portelli is talking about myths -- constructed, in this case, to make explicable unfathomable violence. There is the myth that the German reprisal for the Via Rasella attack occurred after a search for the communist partisans responsible for the latter; the myth that the Germans asked the partisans to turn themselves in and gave them ample time to do so; and that the partisans didn't turn themselves in, thereby carrying the greater share of the responsibility for the massacre lies with those who carried out the attack at Via Rasella. Portelli attacks each myth with aplomb, demonstrating through well-placed citations of existing secondary literature, and through interviews of some who carried out the Via Rasella attack, the nature of each as myth, and, through several interviews of affected families, the functions each myth serves. For him, The Order Has Been Carried Out is an avenue for a multi-perspective, non-linear story to be told, and in his facilitation of its telling, he wishes to make the avenue an open street, perhaps named for each of the 335 victims, which leads somewhere other than to, “the vision of yesterday's losers [and] the discourse of today's winners, the common sense of the new majority… [a majority that] delegates to the Right the concepts of country, honor, faith, death, and sacrifice” (250-251). In this sense, then, another part of Portelli’s project is to restore to popular memory of contemporary Italians the heroism, the faith, the deaths, and the sacrifices of the political Left of the war era – including that of the communist partisans of the Resistance in Rome itself, of the people responsible for the attack at Via Rasella.
For Portelli seeks to contest the “historical revisionism that challenged the meaning of the Resistance as the foundation of the Italian state” (12) as well as the post-1991 normalization of the ex-Fascist right in the mainstream of Italian politics. He says: “...the road that led to the acceptance of the ex-Fascists in the Center-Right coalition that won the elections in 1994 and again in a landslide in 2001… began at the Fosse Ardeatine” (252). His oral history is both an unearthing of this road and an attempt to reconstruct and redirect it: to build a new kind of memory and to disseminate it. His tool to do so – plausibly read as a weapon – is the many stories he facilitates, bound together in one book. The story is not a deadly super-weapon to vanquish foes in one swift, decapitating maneuver; it is the tool of working people, a sturdy shovel or hammer, for long-term, daily use. Decimating memory roads, and the laying of new ones, is grueling, unending work. Perhaps his book could be understood a foundational brick, or whatever material roads are built from. Or, in his own words: “These stories function as the tool that allows us to reconstruct the struggle over memory, to explore the relation between material facts and personal subjectivity, and to perceive the multiple, mutable ways of elaborating on and facing death” (15).
My identification with the political aims of The Order Has Been Carried Out is so total that I cannot bring myself to find anything in Portelli’s approach that I could plausibly call a drawback. Perhaps there are problematic elements – several of which he himself deems to be so – of which I can point to one, that I nevertheless find profoundly moving. In what he describes as “the highest moment in the Priebke trial,” Portelli writes of Giulia Spizzichino refusing to separate the seven relatives she lost in the attack at Via Rasella from the partisans who carried it out:
“… she goes on proudly: ‘Actually, I wish I could say that they were fighting to liberate Rome, unjustly called ‘the open city.’ I cannot take this credit…’ the brothers Di Consiglio were not part of the Resistance. They are part of it now, thanks to the conscience and the memory of those who lived to remember them” (198).
Here Portelli aligns Spizzichino’s testimony with his own aims – of not delegating heroism and sacrifice to the political right – and broadens the scope to whom heroism and sacrifice is to be restored. In this integrative maneuver, Giulia Spizzichino’s sacrifice are the relatives she lost; her heroism, her honor and faith, lie in the way she remembers her family: publicly and politically.
In a later section, Portelli speaks of how “[t]he real heroes of this new [post-1990 right-Wing historical] narrative are the ones in the middle, the ones who did nothing, the prototypes of a citizenry no longer participant (as projected in the post-war Constitution, now discredited and under attack) but, as the new buzz word has it, governable” (251, emphasis mine). In his book, Portelli positions his narrators, Giulia Spizzichino among them, in direct contrast to this new prototype of a “real hero.” His narrators, as he is himself, are participant citizens, joining one another to do something: to remember, to raise hell if need be; to tell their stories together.
P.S. It's impossible to read this and not think about Palestinian resistance fighters in Gaza, their attack on October 7th, and the discourses around them pushed by pro-Israel people. The exceptional, surprisingly successful guerrilla action against an occupying force, the bad-faith invocations of the civilians it killed, the insistence that the guerrillas should "just turn themselves in," the horrifying reprisal that punishes the city and its population, obviously to an insanely greater degree in Gaza, the puncturing of the myth of the invulnerability of the occupier...
If you have any, *any* sympathy for the armed action at via Rosella -- of an attempt to not let the fascist occupiers act with impunity, to liberate "gray" rome under the metal boot of constant violence -- the actions of Hamas on October 7th cannot appear as anything but righteous.
October 12, 2010
This was a compelling oral history, especially for people interested in WWII and Italy. It concerns a Nazi massacre of over three hundred Italians in retribution for a resistance bombing that killed about thirty Nazi soldiers. Over the years, the memory of the event had changed for many people; although the Nazis posted AFTER the massacre that they were going to kill ten Italians for every dead German soldier, many people were remembering the posting as coming BEFORE the massacre, and blamed the resistance bombers for not turning themselves in. People were also remembering this as the only Nazi massacre of the time, forgetting many other atrocities, and this also helped people to blame the resistance. Portelli interviewed a lot of people who were living in Rome and either directly or indirectly involved in the events, and he is trying to show how the memories of the event changed over the years and why they changed.
There is so much here that is really interesting, but it isn't always the easiest book to read. Portelli decides to mix the interviewee's stories together to paint a picture of Italy before, during and after the war, and so the interviews all tend to blend together a bit. It's hard to identify with the individuals because it's hard to keep track of them. And if you are interested in this because you are interested in the war, you'll have a lot of preliminary material to get through about fascism in Italy. But if you want a book that will get you thinking about the construction of memory, this is excellent.
There is so much here that is really interesting, but it isn't always the easiest book to read. Portelli decides to mix the interviewee's stories together to paint a picture of Italy before, during and after the war, and so the interviews all tend to blend together a bit. It's hard to identify with the individuals because it's hard to keep track of them. And if you are interested in this because you are interested in the war, you'll have a lot of preliminary material to get through about fascism in Italy. But if you want a book that will get you thinking about the construction of memory, this is excellent.
May 9, 2022
L'ho trovato molto preciso e intellettualmente onesto. Non sono d'accordo su qualche piccola sfumatura ma lo trovo un'opera ottima.
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September 27, 2007El uso adecuado ded las fuentes orales, en la construcción de la historia de los hechos sociales.
April 18, 2023
From my discussion post:
At its core The Order Has Been Carried Out is a book about memory. In telling the story of the Fosse Ardeatine massacre, Portelli almost perfectly crafts a memoir of the pain and suffering experienced under fascist Italy. Portelli’s innovation is to focus on oral history. Interweaving the stories of the network of affected people into his narrative allows him to capture a sense of place, time, and emotion that is often lacking in historical writing. Rather than open each chapter with a short factual description and then jump into specific oral histories, as a more conventional social or cultural history might, Portelli constantly vacillates between different narrators. As a result, his own voice slips into the background. The focus is more on those more directly affected by the massacres.
As Stephen already noted, Portelli’s monograph is one much more explicitly with a cultural purpose. Portelli is trying to reshape an understanding of a critical moment in Roman and Italian history. The result is that his work is more powerful in its attempts to capture a sense of feeling. It is conceivable that many of the people reading might recognize personally many of the names and actors written about. Names that for a more detached reader like myself disappear into a web of victims and grievers. This quality, however, is not a fault. It more elegantly captures the communal nature of the suffering of Fosse Ardeatine and effortlessly shapes the reader's understanding of the cultural and personal significance of the event.
At its core The Order Has Been Carried Out is a book about memory. In telling the story of the Fosse Ardeatine massacre, Portelli almost perfectly crafts a memoir of the pain and suffering experienced under fascist Italy. Portelli’s innovation is to focus on oral history. Interweaving the stories of the network of affected people into his narrative allows him to capture a sense of place, time, and emotion that is often lacking in historical writing. Rather than open each chapter with a short factual description and then jump into specific oral histories, as a more conventional social or cultural history might, Portelli constantly vacillates between different narrators. As a result, his own voice slips into the background. The focus is more on those more directly affected by the massacres.
As Stephen already noted, Portelli’s monograph is one much more explicitly with a cultural purpose. Portelli is trying to reshape an understanding of a critical moment in Roman and Italian history. The result is that his work is more powerful in its attempts to capture a sense of feeling. It is conceivable that many of the people reading might recognize personally many of the names and actors written about. Names that for a more detached reader like myself disappear into a web of victims and grievers. This quality, however, is not a fault. It more elegantly captures the communal nature of the suffering of Fosse Ardeatine and effortlessly shapes the reader's understanding of the cultural and personal significance of the event.
August 24, 2024
Il grande merito del libro di Portelli è non solo ricostruire minuziosamente i fatti antecedenti all attentato di via Rasella e alla strage delle Fosse Ardeatine tramite le interviste dei testimoni diretti o indiretti, ma in ultima istanza evidenziare la fragilità della memoria storica.
Molti intervistati sono tuttora convinti che furono affissi manifesti per invitare gli attentatori a presentarsi (FALSO) o che il battaglione Bozen fossero innocui vecchietti (FALSO). I partigiani non si presentarono, vale la pena ribadirlo ancora una volta, perché non ci fu nessun annuncio. E soprattutto non ci fu tempo. La strage venne eseguita in 24h perché si temeva che Roma sarebbe insorta, alla notizia di un tale massacro.
La memoria è una cosa flebile, e Portelli lo mostra bene in questo voluminoso testo. Unica pecca: le continue interviste, inframezzate da commenti dell autore, non lo rendono proprio un libro facilissimo.
Ma vale davvero la pena leggerlo, magari concludendo con una visita alle Fosse Ardeatine.
Molti intervistati sono tuttora convinti che furono affissi manifesti per invitare gli attentatori a presentarsi (FALSO) o che il battaglione Bozen fossero innocui vecchietti (FALSO). I partigiani non si presentarono, vale la pena ribadirlo ancora una volta, perché non ci fu nessun annuncio. E soprattutto non ci fu tempo. La strage venne eseguita in 24h perché si temeva che Roma sarebbe insorta, alla notizia di un tale massacro.
La memoria è una cosa flebile, e Portelli lo mostra bene in questo voluminoso testo. Unica pecca: le continue interviste, inframezzate da commenti dell autore, non lo rendono proprio un libro facilissimo.
Ma vale davvero la pena leggerlo, magari concludendo con una visita alle Fosse Ardeatine.
March 1, 2022
This book it really great and has so much amazing information, but I think Portelli see to dull out the voices of his interviewees. It was easy to get a bit overwhelmed with the book with the amount of information that Portelli gives you.
December 18, 2018
Such a difficult read but a great examination of memory, history, and cultural identity especially as it’s transmitted through markers and generations.
May 9, 2019
Muy buen libro que relata el paso a paso de los hechos que culminaron en la denominada "Matanza de las Fosas Ardeatinas". Una historia que todos deberíamos leer alguna vez.
May 30, 2021
Un'opera monumentale per importanza e contenuto.
May 26, 2025
quello che in genere si crede di sapere su via rasella e sulle fosse ardeatine è sbagliato, incompleto, confuso. quanto tempo è passato tra l'attentato e la rappresaglia, chi erano le vittime, era legittimo l'ordine, perché i gap non hanno evitato l'eccidio? portelli mette ordine ma non solo: rivela un mucchio di fatti che non si dicono mai. tante testimonianze completano il suo racconto. illuminante.
December 30, 2010
Il libro "definitivo", se mai può esistere tal libro, sulla strage delle Fosse Ardeatine.
Contro ogni negazionismo, contro le schifose polemiche della destra e, ancor di più, di certi sinistri personaggi.
Imperdibile
Contro ogni negazionismo, contro le schifose polemiche della destra e, ancor di più, di certi sinistri personaggi.
Imperdibile
November 18, 2014
Another good study on memory, how memory was divided on a single event, the Ardeatine Caves Massacre. Some people of Rome blamed the Nazi and some blamed the partisan as the cause of the massacre.
Want to read
February 22, 2010Nazi massacre in rome
Displaying 1 - 16 of 16 reviews