4 giugno 1944 - L’ultima conquista di Roma

Year: 2006 Format: 15x21 Pages: 224 Photos: b/w col A historical-tourist and hiking route from the Lepini Mountains to Rome in the footsteps of the partisan Gozzer and the Canadian and Black Devils. “Welcome to Rome Major” “Welcome to Rome Major”, with this phrase, pronounced under the arches of Porta Maggiore, Tito Vittorio Gozzer inextricably linked his name to history. It was the late afternoon of 4 June 1944, when the vanguards of the Allied Fifth Army arrived at the gates of Rome and were preparing to liberate it from the hateful Nazi occupation. At the head of those columns of men in arms there was an officer of the Italian Army, a Trentino man from Valsugana who had been wandering around Rome and in the Lepini Mountains area for months, busy organizing the Resistance. A few days earlier, finding himself near the city of Norma, Gozzer encountered a unit of the "Black Devils", the vanguard of the Fifth Army, and was immediately added to it, as a guide and interpreter. The reconstruction of Gozzer's events and movements in the Lepini Mountains area, and of the subsequent ones, which ended with his arrival in Rome, are described in this book together with the historical, hiking and tourist route to which they gave rise. The hiking route develops mainly on mountain paths, begins in the lost city of Ninfa, today one of the most beautiful gardens in Italy, climbs to the highest peak of the Lepini Mountains and touches all the cities that overlook the Pontine Plain: Sermoneta, Bassiano, Norma, Cori, Rocca Massima and Artena. Once you arrive in Artena, you continue by public transport to the outskirts of Rome, where you resume your journey and arrive at Porta Maggiore, following the stupendous thousand-year-old arches of the Roman Aqueducts.