Museo Storico Casa dell’Eccidio di Tavolicci

The Museo Storico Casa dell’Eccidio di Tavolicci (Tavolicci Casa dell’Eccidio Historical Museum) commemorates the location of a mass execution in which 64 civilians were killed by members of the IV German-Italian Police Battalion on July 22, 1944. That night, the town’s inhabitants were rounded up and locked in the Casa dell’Eccidio, then machine-gunned as the building was set on fire. While some were able to escape by jumping out of windows, 64 were killed including 19 children under the age of 10.

The largest act of mass violence against civilians in the Emilia-Romagna region during the Second World War, the killings remained difficult to analyze for decades owing to the remote location and lack of documentation. Starting in the 1970s, local researchers sought out and ultimately recorded 27 oral testimonies of the event; over the following decades, discovery of additional files on the period of German occupation allowed for further research into the event. This information and documentation, and the conclusions drawn from this work, are recorded at the Istituto Storico della Resistenza e dell’Età Contemporanea di Forlì-Cesena (Forlì-Cesena Historical Institute on Resistance and Contemporary History).

The house serves as a monument to the loss of life, and displays materials relating to the massacre and the Second World War in Tavolicci.