From the intersection of Corso Giovecca and Via Borgo dei Leoni, the castle and its moat and defensive wall are on the right, across from the Teatro Comunale and a long row of arches forming a portico. Next to the castle, the road widens to become Piazza Savonarola, delimited at the far end by the via Coperta, which connects Palazzo Ducale (now Municipale) with Castello Estense, and characterised by the monument dedicated to the famous Dominican friar (Savonarola) originally from Ferrara and killed in Florence for heresy and deception. Continuing onwards is Palazzo Municipale and, directly opposite, Palazzo Arcivescovile (at n. 67), built between 1718 and 1720 at the behest of Cardinal Tommaso Ruffo, first archbishop of Ferrara. The last part of the street is marked by the Duomo (Cathedral), which faces the Volto del Cavallo (Arch of the Horse), leading to Piazza Municipale; the town hall and Torre della Vittoria (Tower of Victory), which looks out onto Piazza Trento Trieste. Torre dell’orologio (the clock tower) marks the start of Corso Porta Reno.

The name Corso Martiri della Libertà (once called Piazza del Commercio and Piazza della Pace - for more information, please see the place name study by Gerolamo Melchiorri) is a reference to the massacre - the execution by the Fascists of 11 anti-fascist citizens - that took place on 15 November 1943. This tragic event, the first massacre of civil war in Italy, is an indelible part of the local collective memory, important on a national level as well.

The terrible event took place in various parts of the city. However, aside from Via Boldini (where Cinzio Belletti, witness of the reprisal, was gunned down against the wall of the auditorium of the Music Conservatory, and the gardens between the Montagnone area and the Bastion of San Tommaso, where a column topped with a cross commemorates Girolamo Savonuzzi and Arturo Torboli), it was on the current Corso Martiri that the most victims fell, in the section of the moat wall of the castle before the portico, between the dead end of the theatre and Via Cairoli. To remember the event, precisely in the place of the shooting, are two small commemorative plaques listing the names of the eight anti-fascists who were killed: Emilio Arlotti, Pasquale Colagrande, Mario Hanau, Vittore Hanau, Giulio Piazzi, Ugo Teglio, Alberto Vita Finzi and Mario Zanatta. In addition, there are two plaques on the pillars that hold up the gate looking out over the moat, at the corner of Piazza Savonarola. The first reads: ‘At dawn on 15 November / with a hasty massacre / of eleven citizens / proudly disdainful of servitude, / the despotism / of a factious initiative / began / carrier and accomplice of German Nazism / the appalling sequence of its act / of fierce reprisal / officially authorised / and / cynically glorified’. The other: ‘Ferrara / returned with political freedom / to / the inviolable sovereignty of law / entrusts / the punishment of this crime / in its motives and the forms / among the most monstrous and abject / to the judgement of God / and to the conscience of the people / matured and purified in martyrdom / redeemed / by the idea of peace, love and justice / 15 November MDMXLV / the Municipality’.

The deeply anti-fascist author Giorgio Bassani can be credited with a unique portrait of this road.

As often happens in his narrative works, the reader is introduced to the plot through an animated view, be it the result of the invention of a memory or a postcard, for example, from which a detail or character stands out, taking on (at times progressively, at times suddenly) greater depth and thus leading fully into the event. This happens in Una notte del ’43, a story which begins with a long, meandering sequence, which also refers to the symbolic and memorial significance of Corso Martiri della Libertà, a sequence of scenes that is worth mentioning here, reducing omissions to a minimum.

‘At first you might not be aware of it. But once you’ve been seated for a few minutes at one of the small outside tables of Caffè della Borsa, with the sheer crag of the clocktower before you and, a bit to the right, the crenellated terrace of the Orangery, the whole thing dawns on you This is what happens. In summer or winter, rain or shine, it’s very unusual for whoever crosses that stretch of Corso Roma to prefer keeping to the opposite sidewalk that runs along the dark-brown back of the Castle moat. If anyone does so, then it’s sure to be a tourist, finger wedged between the pages of the Touring Guide, gaze tilted upward; or a travelling salesman who, with his leather bag under his arm, is hurrying toward the station; or a farm worker from the Po delta come to the city for the market who, waiting to take the local afternoon bus back to Comacchio or Codigoro, with evident embarrassment lugs his body weighed down with the food and wine he consumed a little after midday in a dive in San Romano. In short, it could be anyone, except someone from Ferrara.

The visitor goes past and the café regulars stare and grin. Yet, at certain hours of the day, those eyes stare in a strange way, even the breath is shorter. The boredom and laziness of the provinces might germinate all kinds of imaginary massacres. It is as though the sidewalk stones opposite were about to be blown to bits by the explosion of a mine detonated by the unwary visitor's foot. Or else as though a rapid burst of bullets from the Fascist machine gunner who, as it happened, fired precisely from here, from under the portico of Caffè della Borsa one night in December 1943,murdering eleven citizens on that stretch of sidewalk, should make the incautious passer-by perform the same brief, ghastly jig, all startled twists and jumps, in that moment of death those victims undoubtedly performed before falling lifeless one on top of the other - those whom history has for years consecrated as the very first victims of the Italian Civil War.

Of course, none of this happens. No mine explodes, no machine gun returns to pepper the low wall opposite with bullet holes. And so this visitor who, let's suppose, has come to Ferrara to admire its fine artistic heritage, can pass by in front of the little marble plaques bearing the engraved names of the executed persons without his thoughts being assailed by the least disturbance.

And yet, sometimes, something does happen.

One suddenly hears a voice. It isn’t a powerful voice, but rather a raw, cracked voice as boys have at the onset of puberty. And since it emerges from the puny chest of Pino Barilari, the owner of the adjoining pharmacy, who, at one of the windows of the apartment above, remains invisible to whomever is seated below, it really sounds as though it has descended from the heavens. The voice says: ‘Beware young man!’, or: ‘Careful!’ ...It's not, I repeat, as though these words were yelled out. Rather, it sounds like a friendly warning, like advice given in the tone of someone who doesn’t expect to be listened to, nor, in the end, who has that much desire to be heard. So the tourist, or whoever else happens at that moment to be treading the sidewalk that every true Ferrarese avoids, usually continues on his way without giving any sign of having understood the warning.

But the customers of the Caffè della Borsa, as I've already said, understand it only too well.

As soon as the absent-minded outsider hoves into view, the hubbub of conversation is quelled. Eyes stare, the breath is held. Will that person, who has nearly arrived at the paving-stones where the shooting took place, realise that he's about to do something he’d be much better leaving undone? Will he or will he not finally lift his head out of the Touring Guide? But above all, at a given moment, with the aerial and absurd, sad and ironic voice of the invisible Pino Barilari descend from above, or will it not? Maybe yes. Maybe no. Awaiting the outcome often has a quality of muscular contraction, no more or less than that which attends a sporting event whose result is especially uncertain.

‘Whoa there!’

Suddenly, in everyone’s mind’s eye, the image of the chemist at the upstairs apartment window materialises. So, this time. he's there seated at the windowsill, on the lookout, with his thin, hairy, very white arms raised to point at the passer-by who hasn’t noticed the glint of the field glasses above. Many of those hidden in the protective shadow of the portico experience vivid relief to be where they are, rather than out in the open, utterly exposed.’

(G. Bassani, A Night in ‘43, trans. from the Italian by Jamie McKendrick in The Novel of Ferrara, Mondadori 2001, p. 173s.)