The construction site of the Citadel of Concentration Camp Music in Barletta (Puglia) is scheduled to open before the end of the year. Once completed, it will house the results of years of research by Italian-Jewish pianist Francesco Lotoro to rescue musical pieces composed in concentration, labor and prison camps in Germany and elsewhere along with manuscripts, documents and artifacts from Nazi extermination camps and Soviet gulags.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cAll the pieces seem to be falling into place: I feel quite optimistic,\u201d Lotoro told Pagine Ebraiche after meeting with Italy\u2019s Minister of Culture Alessandro Giuli to present the project. The citadel, developed on Lotoro\u2019s initiative, will occupy the site of a former distillery in Barletta, a city in southeastern Italy on the Adriatic Sea, where the artist born in 1964 and lives.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The citadel is to include a museum, a library and a theater, and it will contain testimonies from the twenty years between Hitler\u2019s rise to power in Germany and the death of Stalin in the Soviet Union. Lotoro gathered the material from homes and archives around the world in the name of an idea: \u201cWe could not save these women and men, but we saved their music, which is a way of saving their lives metaphorically and metaphysically.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Lotoro showed the minister some manuscripts and a violin that had been played in the death camps. \u201cHe already knew about the project and had it illustrated in detail. He supported it, which is very important.\u201d By April, Lotoro announced, the \u201ccompetition of ideas\u201d supported by the Puglia Region should be launched. From then on, \u201cthe timetable will be fast: in three years all the material should be moved to the Citadel.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"