A Place of Ordinary Suffering

My research focuses on the memory of a place whose history has mostly gone unwritten
and whose value as a heritage site is being disputed. The prison ‘Le Nuove’ was a place
of suffering from the time it opened in the 19th century, when prisoners were kept in total
isolation, were regularly beaten and would be chained naked in damp basement cells if
they ever broke the stringent rules of the prison code. The same cells hosted tortured
partisans after their interrogations by the gestapo just before they were executed when the
city of Turin was under nazi occupation. Then again, as late as the mid 1970s the cells
were used to punish rebellious inmates by strapping them to beds often for days at a time,
leaving them unable to move and forced to urinate and defecate through a hole in the
mattress. The prison was a theater of injustice where people often went crazy, committed
suicide or simply swallowed metal objects or tore at their skin with broken shards of
glass or sharpened spoons.

A dwindling group of ex partisans, many of whom went to concentration camps after
being held in ‘Le Nuove’, wants to turn the prison into a museum. They have managed to
get at least parts of it landmarked. For the city, the prison is just a ruin on very valuable
real estate and city authorities would like to see it turned into office space, or perhaps into
a sports center. The suffering that once was contained between its walls is seen by them
as part of the ordinary prison experience and thus not worth preserving.

My paper explores the question of ‘ordinary suffering’ and raises questions on our
methods and standards for deciding which grievances/traumas from the past should be
passed on to future generations.