Santuario della Madonna di Lourdes

The guide to the Santuario della Madonna di Lourdes in Verona opens with a white marble Virgin carved in nineteen-oh-eight by Veronese sculptor Ugo Zannoni, and the Allied bombing on the sixteenth of April, nineteen forty-five, that sent her falling more than fifteen meters through collapsing masonry. From there it turns to the hill chosen for her new home, an Austrian fort built in eighteen thirty-eight on the site of an older monastery, and to what that fort became under German occupation between nineteen forty-three and nineteen forty-five. Documented cases from those years describe interrogations before prisoners were shot or shipped to camps like Mauthausen. Stand where you are now and notice you are inside what used to be a cell block.