During my stay at the BSR I understood the true value of researching place while in place. Because my project was about finding traces of the past in the contemporary city my targeted field-work was ineffably enriched by the serendipity of what I found in my daily walks. Three months is barely enough and can merely bring us to the Socratic notion of only knowing that we know nothing about a new topic. But it was three months well spent, three months that took me all around Rome to experience many sites connected with the turbulent years of Rome's history from 1943 to 1948.

Being with artists exploring their creative practices inspired me to explore how I could do the same while remaining true to my own practice as a historian. It inspired me to walk the city from the point of view of two partisans involved with the Via Rasella bomb attack. I was able to reconstruct the route from primary sources, and I worked with another fellow, Étienne Desrosiers, to create a filmic narrative entitled ‘Carla and Sasà: a Story of Love and War’. The story was set in March 1944 but it was filmed in the contemporary city to accentuate the non-presence of an event whose reverberations are seen and felt throughout the whole city like a kind of ‘shrapnel of memories’ that take the form of plaques and tripping stones that I also documented during my time there. I was also able to ‘close the circle’ on this event by attending the yearly commemoration for the tragic massacre that happened the day after the bomb attack at the national monument of the Fosse Ardeatine. This project is about tracing the memory of the period of Nazi occupation which is still alive in the contemporary city, and my time at the BSR enabled me to give it the foundational knowledge I need to keep it going.