An installation consisting of the work Il Muro Occidentale o del Pianto (inv. 441) and 125 white roses in vases, arranged in twenty-five rows of five items each. The work was first presented at the Scuderie Aldobrandini in Frascati as part of the ‘La memoria simbolica’ exhibition, where Mauri paid tribute to the young students of the ‘WeiUe Rose’1 (White Rose) movement who, in the 1940s, opposed the National Socialist dictatorship in Munich through non-violent actions based on passive resistance, informational activities and leafleting. Quoting the Bible, Aristotle, St Augustine, Rilke, Novalis, Goethe and Schiller, these young people in their early twenties appealed to the people and the German intelligentsia, trusting that they could awaken a common consciousness and oppose Nazism. They ending up being tortured and guillotined by the Gestapo on charges of sabotage and defamation. As Domenico Scudero wrote, here the white roses counterbalance the suitcase-bricks of a ‘wall erected by indifference, a lack of indignation, by an extended generation that did not want to see and would not admit to having heard’,2 symbolising the purity of a group that, born within Nazi society, instead went to its death with a ‘conscious awareness of verbal action, at the risk of political accusations of “treason”.’3

1. The White Rose group was founded by siblings Hans and Sophie Scholl, Christoph Probst, Alexander Schmorell and Willi Graf, who were joined by a professor, Kurt Huber, who drafted the last two pamphlets.
2. D. Scudero, Nell’inferno una utopia, in La memoria simbolica, catalogue of the exhibition (Scuderie Aldobrandini, Frascati, 2000), edited by M. Riposati, Diagonale, Rome 2000, p. 6.
3. Ibid., p. 7.