MEMO4345 is the memory museum of Borgo San Dalmazzo, opened in September 2021 in the former church of Sant'Anna, a seventeenth-century building deconsecrated and restored for the purpose. It stands a few metres from the Memorial to the Deportation and not far from the station, and this is no logistical detail: the museum recounts what happened exactly out there.
What to see
The route is multimedia and reconstructs the fate of the 357 Jews — 334 foreign and 23 Italian, by the museum's count — deported to Auschwitz from the camp active in the town between September 1943 and February 1944, set within the wider frame of the Shoah in Europe. At the centre of the display is Ombre nella memoria, a work of 2011 by Enrico Tealdi, conceived as a kind of secular altar. There is then an interactive screen with the profiles of about 180 deportees: faces, places of birth, dates, and those very long journeys from one European country to another that came before the capture. Seven video accounts follow individual family stories.
Visiting
The display was designed by Studio Kuadra, the same practice behind the memorial of 2006, and it came about with European funds, a contribution from the Fondazione Cassa di Risparmio di Cuneo for the restoration of the building, and municipal resources. On Saturdays and Sundays you enter on a guided tour at set times, morning and afternoon; from Tuesday to Friday the museum opens on request for groups and schools. It is best to phone or write ahead, since visits are accompanied.
Our editors' tip
Behind the names lies decades of archival work: that of Adriana Muncinelli, who reconstructed the identities of the deportees across European archives and survivors' testimony, and who turned it with Elena Fallo into the book Oltre il nome. It is worth lingering at the interactive screen longer than you would expect: it is the point where the figure of the deportation becomes again a list of people, each with a date of birth and a route.