Rome - Less than a week after three streets in Rome named after antisemitic scientists were rededicated to two pioneering Jewish female scholars and an anti-fascist professor, two of the new street signs were vandalized with black paint overnight.
“Disgraceful gesture. Let’s clean up immediately,” Virginia Raggi, the mayor of Rome, wrote on Twitter on Wednesday morning, denouncing the episode.
The streets of the Italian capital previously carried the names of psychiatrist Arturo Donaggi and Edoardo Zavattari, a biologist who promoted the idea of scientific racism. In 1938, both of them signed the antisemitic Manifesto Della Razza (Racial Manifesto), the ideological and pseudo-scientific base for the racial policies of Benito Mussolini’s fascist regime.
The streets in Rome named for Donaggi and Zavattari were renamed for Enrica Calabresi, Nella Mortara and Mario Carrara last Thursday.
