Mussolini's villa to host Holocaust Museum

ROME - The former residence of Fascist dictator Benito Mussolini in the Italian capital will host a museum dedicated to Rome's victims of the Holocaust, the city's mayor said.

Rome officials said Tuesday that construction of the museum in Mussolini's Villa Torlonia hasn't yet begun, but that they nevertheless expected the museum to open as soon as 2006.

"It's a place that has a symbolic value and an important meaning for the martyrdom of Jews in our city," Mayor Walter Veltroni said in making the announcement.

The gardens surrounding Villa Torlonia, a 19th century neoclassical villa near Rome's city center, have been a public park since the late 1970s. Mussolini lived in the villa for much of his rule, from 1922 to 1943.

Widespread persecution of Italian Jews began in 1938, when Mussolini's regime issued racial laws. In 1943, German troops occupied northern and central Italy, and almost 7,000 Jews were deported, 5,910 of whom were killed.

In Rome, 2,091 Jews were rounded up for concentration camps.

The museum will feature documentaries and other audiovisual material describing the deportation of Jews, officials said. It will also testify to wartime massacres, such as the 1944 killing of 335 civilians in the Ardeatine Caves outside Rome.

Veltroni said the city is trying to secure material from Steven Spielberg's Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation, which gathers videotaped testimony of Holocaust survivors, news reports said.

Veltroni told the ANSA news agency that he discussed the possibility with the Oscar-winning director during his visit to Rome earlier this month.