Dieci italiani per un tedesco (Via Rasella)

In 1944, just before the end of the war in Rome, Italian partisans planted a bomb on Rome's Via Rasella that killed 32 members of a German patrol. When Hitler heard the news, he said that the Italians must be taught a "lesson of terror." And so 320 Italians, many of them simply in the wrong place at the wrong time, were rounded up. The men were taken to the Fosse Ardeatine near the catacombs and the Quo Vadis Chapel, where they were massacred in the caves. The film deals very poignantly with the last hours in the lives of the victims. The movie bears some resemblance to the period, if not the events, depicted in the more famous OPEN CITY of Rossellini, and is not of the same stature, but it is still very dramatic and very well directed and acted. Gino Cervi and Sergio Fantoni figure very importantly in the large cast. Another version of the same events was the 1973 MASSACRE IN ROME by George Pan Cosmatos, with Marcello Mastroianni and Richard Burton.