Rome came a step closer to the creation of a National Shoah Museum on Monday after a city council board gave the definitive go-ahead to the project, Rome Mayor Gianni Alemanno said.
The museum, which still needs to be greenlighted by the city council assembly, will be a built in landscaped gardens of Villa Torlonia, the grand neoclassical residence where Mussolini and his family lived between 1925 and 1943.
Designed by Italian Luca Zevi and Giorgio Tamburini, the museum will be in the form of a black cuboid with the names of Italian Jews deported to Nazi concentration camps during WWII etched on the walls.
Alemanno said he hoped to announce the invitation for tenders to build the 13-million-euro museum in January, with completion slated for 2011.
The head of Rome's Jewish community, Riccardo Pacifici, stressed that plans for the museum had been announced two years ago and urged the council to speed up its approval.
The museum was first mooted under former mayor Walter Veltroni, now leader of the opposition Democratic Party, who initially stayed on as a member of the city-sponsored museum committee after Alemanno became mayor.
But Veltroni quit after his successor stirred polemics in September by saying that although Fascism's racial laws were an ''absolute evil'', the movement itself was not.
Alemanno later clarified that while he condemned ''without hesitation'' the antidemocratic and repressive nature of Fascism, this did not stop him from ''paying homage to those who fought and died for that cause in good faith''.
The mayor has since tried to smooth over relations with the city's Jewish community and travelled with Pacifici to the Auschwitz-Birkenau Nazi extermination camp last week.
Alemanno was formerly a leader of the neofascist Italian Social Movement (MSI) youth federation, which later became the more moderate National Alliance and moved into the political mainstream.
The National Alliance is now part of Premier Silvio Berlusconi's People of Freedom Party.
