Caserma Zucchi

From cattle market to barracks

The building began as a livestock market and food-storage site before becoming military accommodation in 1877. During the German occupation, fighting and executions made it a significant local site of repression. After liberation its rooms were put to a different use: housing people displaced by war.

Duke Francesco IV commissioned it in 1845 from the architect Pietro Marchelli; it was finished in 1853. The barracks took the name of Carlo Zucchi, a Napoleonic general, and housed the 3rd Artillery Regiment.

A heritage description gives the building its original name, the Foro Boario, and sets out its arrangement: the upper floor was a warehouse for supplies and the lower floor the cattle market. When it was converted into a barracks the porticoes of the first floor were filled in.

Occupation and liberation

German forces seized the barracks on the night of 8 to 9 September 1943, killing three Italian soldiers who resisted: Antonio Giannone, Lino Bertone and Carlo Giannotti. On 13 January 1945 the partisan commander Angelo Zanti was shot in the courtyard.

A refuge for people with nowhere to go

A contemporary report explains why Jewish refugees were taken to Reggio Emilia. UNRRA had learned that they were homeless and destitute in Milan. The agency arranged accommodation in the camp as part of its response to a continuing movement of refugees through Italy.

Many hoped to travel onward to Palestine. The report describes the Italian camps as stops within that journey, while also revealing how the need for immediate shelter could bring people with deeply opposed political experiences into a shared institution.

It was run first by the Allied military authorities and then by UNRRA, and could hold about a thousand people. Residents of dozens of nationalities shared it, and the Jewish refugees were a minority. Two British officers, Major Lewis and Lieutenant Eyston, are named as its commanders in 1946.

UNRRA’s Italy Mission records include a camp list of May 1946 covering twenty-seven Russian and Ukrainian residents, recording whether each wished to be repatriated. It is not a population count.

The May Day attack

On 1 May 1946, a group of Ukrainian former prisoners attacked Jewish refugees gathered for a May Day celebration. Local historical accounts describe the assault as antisemitic and record two deaths across the violence and its aftermath.

Istoreco’s research records two dead and calls the attack premeditated; its published accounts differ on the wounded, giving about twenty in one and about thirty on the Livello 9 site page. A survey of the Italian camps instead gives one killed and four seriously wounded, with a red flag as the trigger.

A June 1946 report gives a more detailed sequence. One Jewish victim died following the initial attack. Camp authorities then arranged to move the Ukrainians elsewhere. During a confrontation as the transfer was being organised, Italian police fired into a crowd and killed another Jewish person. The report attributes the original assault to a specific group of attackers; it does not establish collective responsibility for every Ukrainian resident.

Local accounts describe the attacking group as former prisoners of war who had fought under General Vlasov.

Transfers and demands for accountability

By 14 May, UNRRA announced that approximately 1,000 Jewish residents were being transferred from Reggio Emilia to camps reserved for Jewish refugees in southern Italy. This was a movement between camps within Italy, not an overseas resettlement programme.

The same report records that the commanders, while declining to punish the attackers, moved all the Ukrainian residents to another, unnamed camp.

The Organisation of Jewish Refugees in Italy subsequently submitted a memorandum to the Allied Control Commission and UNRRA demanding punishment of those responsible. The June report stated that witnesses had identified 18 participants in the initial assault and protested that the attackers had not been punished. Spanish Republican refugees were among those described as witnesses.

The building and its memory

The barracks later returned to military use, which continued until 1975. Cultural institutions followed, and the restored complex became a university site in 2005. It was renamed Palazzo Giuseppe Dossetti in 2007.

After 1975 the Comune used the complex for civic museums, a music institute and a social centre. The university’s own history dates the Dossetti dedication to 2013.

The camp’s history remains part of local remembrance. A historical lecture announced for 3 May 2026 at Reggio Emilia’s synagogue focused specifically on the May Day attack and its victims, eighty years after the events.

Published work does not establish when the camp opened or closed, its population, the names of those killed, or how daily life was arranged.