The Healing Pickaxe and Invented Ancestry

Before you lies a 1st-century Roman theatre, but its sudden exposure is an artefact of 20th-century ideological violence. For hundreds of years, this hillside was covered by the dense, polyglot tenements of Riborgo and the historic Jewish Ghetto. Between 1934 and 1938, the fascist municipal administration unleashed the so-called 'piccone risanatore'—the 'healing pickaxe'. They demolished medieval lanes, artisanal workshops, the childhood home of poet Umberto Saba, and two historic synagogues specifically to unearth Roman masonry. The political motive was transparent: to fabricate physical evidence that Trieste was fundamentally an ancient Roman, and therefore strictly Italian, imperial city. In a tragic historical irony, this clearance campaign was commissioned and overseen by Enrico Paolo Salem, Trieste’s Jewish Fascist mayor. In August 1938, as anti-Semitic state policies took hold, Salem was forced to resign. One month later, Mussolini arrived in person to inaugurate these cleared Roman stones and publicly proclaim the Italian Racial Laws.