Children of Villa Emma’s Memorial, Nonantola, Italy

This museum and memorial is dedicated to the story of a group of Jewish youths of German, Austrian, and Yugoslav origin who were headed to Palestine and, between 1942 and 1943, found refuge at Villa Emma — a country residence surrounded by greenery, located directly across from the new museum and separated from it by Via Mavora, the road connecting Nonantola to Modena.

Descrizione originale del progetto (proposta di concorso)

The Villa Emma Foundation chose to launch a design competition to select the project for a place of memory dedicated to the story of the seventy‑three Jewish youths who were headed to Palestine and, between 1942 and 1943, were given refuge at Villa Emma—a large country house built in Nonantola at the end of the nineteenth century as a summer residence. The museum‑memorial will be built on the area known as Prato Galli, located directly opposite the villa that sheltered the youths. The multifunctional building will include a museum installation, spaces for the Villa Emma Foundation, and a conference hall.

Why the memorial: notes on the historical events
The young Jewish exiles and their chaperones arrived in Nonantola in two separate moments. The first group—composed of boys and girls from Austria and Germany—reached the town’s railway station in mid‑July 1942. Before that, the group had been stranded in Zagreb following the German invasion of 6 April 1941, and later in Slovenia. Thanks to the intervention of DELASEM — the Delegation for the Assistance of Jewish Emigrants — the youths were brought to Villa Emma, which had long been uninhabited and had been identified as an ideal place to host them. In April 1943, another thirty‑three younger children who had fled Bosnia and Croatia joined the first group.
The seventy‑three exiles, aged between six and twenty‑one, suddenly found themselves in a small rural town whose mentality and material conditions were very different from those of their places of origin. Yet, divided between hours of study and hours of work, their time in Nonantola became a positive period, rich in experiences and relationships woven with many of the town’s inhabitants, and Villa Emma proved to be a temporary but safe refuge. After 8 September 1943, however, with the arrival of German troops in Nonantola, the youths were forced to abandon the villa; some were temporarily hidden in the episcopal seminary, while others found shelter in private homes. When the idea of taking the group south to meet the Allied forces became unfeasible, the most viable option was to lead them to Switzerland, which they reached—through an adventurous journey—in October 1943. After spending some time in various reception camps, the group was reunited and, once the war had ended, left by ship from Barcelona, arriving in Palestine on 29 May 1945.

All the Villa Emma youths survived, with the exception of fifteen‑year‑old Salomon Papo and the DELASEM official Goffredo Pacifici.

The context
The intervention area—consisting of a partially wooded, L‑shaped plot on which two masonry rural buildings once stood—is located in the southern part of the municipality of Nonantola, in the province of Modena. The site is bounded on the west by Via Mavora, which separates it from the park of Villa Emma; on the south by Via Donizetti; while to the east and north it borders private areas developed from the 1960s onward, characterized by small apartment buildings and semi‑detached residences.

The project
Two rural buildings dating back to the late nineteenth century, long abandoned and known as Case Sacerdoti, originally stood on Prato Galli. The decision—far from obvious—to demolish them and construct a new building from scratch stemmed both from the functional rigidity of the existing structures and from the awareness that the interventions required to meet current structural and environmental standards—such as energy‑efficiency performance and seismic‑safety regulations—would have compromised the character of the farmhouses and constrained the design choices in relation to the objectives set by the competition brief. However, what have been described as “the stones that witnessed” the lives of the youths remain as a tangible trace of history: the salvaged bricks will be reused as cladding for the wall that guides visitors from the exterior area to the building’s entrance.

In our conception of the memorial, the building and the town’s landscape together form the place of memory, and the pairs “inside / outside” and “near / far” served as the guiding principles of the project. From these premises, it became clear that the space could only be imagined as a single‑level environment, a place with “uncertain” boundaries in continuous dialogue with its surroundings. This idea was developed through three main themes: the rarefaction of boundaries; the reference to the countryside as a space of discovery; and the reference to the Jewish sukkah as an archetype of temporary shelter—one that welcomes and protects during a journey. The memorial’s plan is drawn on an orthogonal grid disrupted by symbolic axes corresponding to the physical routes and human relationships that shaped Nonantola during the period when the group of youths lived at Villa Emma, as well as by the ideal line connecting the villa to Israel.

The walls and glazed surfaces that define the building envelope support the flat roof, punctuated by both fixed and operable skylights. While the portion of the roof corresponding to the interior consists of an opaque slab, the exterior areas near the entrances are covered by laminated glass panels that provide protection from the elements while allowing natural light to filter through. A unifying feature of the roof—visible both outside and inside—is a system of vertical louvers: metal on the exterior and wood on the interior.

Functional programme and internal layout
From the exterior grounds, visitors are guided to the building’s entrance along a covered walkway flanked by the wall clad with bricks salvaged from the pre‑existing structures. The entrance area provides access on one side to the exhibition space and on the other to the group welcome room, which is adjacent to the cloakroom and service block. The Foundation’s offices have been designed to ensure flexible use and have an independent entrance on the building’s eastern façade; the multipurpose room, located to the north, can likewise be used for presentations and conferences independently of the memorial’s opening hours.

Structural aspects
The choice of material for the load‑bearing structures and the roof slab fell on wood, a material capable of offering excellent structural and thermal performance and well suited to prefabrication.
The walls will be built using CLT (Cross‑Laminated Timber) structural panels; the load‑bearing panels, composed of five layers of cross‑laminated boards, will have thicknesses of 100 and 160 mm. This construction technology makes it possible to complete the structural work in a shorter time than with more traditional systems and allows most of the fabrication to take place in the workshop, leaving only assembly operations to be carried out on site.
The roof slab consists of a framework of beams measuring 12 × 32 cm, with timber boarding on the upper surface. The foundations are reinforced‑concrete raft foundations with perimeter beams supporting the CLT walls.

Exhibition design
The exhibition design is currently under development. In general terms, the competition proposal envisioned the exhibition route as composed of audio‑video contributions, objects, prints, and texts, with a significant role assigned to the oral testimonies of those who witnessed the events—creating a multi‑voiced narrative. The project also proposed dedicating the boundary walls and the exterior partitions to images providing historical context for the story of the rescued youths, while the central spine—which also serves as a structural element of the building—would host the narrative of the days the youths spent at Villa Emma and, more broadly, of their relationship with the territory of Nonantola.

Distributed artistic itinerary
In addition to the design of the Memorial, the competition brief required a proposal for a symbolic element capable of identifying the route connecting the houses and gathering places frequented by the youths during their stay in Nonantola.
The sign we chose—a small chair, symbolizing welcome and hospitality—refers to the most human and emotionally resonant dimension of this story: the network of homes, workshops, and shops that opened their doors to the group of Villa Emma youths.
The chairs we designed will be cast in bronze, a material with a centuries‑old sculptural tradition which, in this context, elevates an everyday object into something extraordinary. The backrest of each chair will bear the logo of the new center and a reference to the stages of the itinerary, while the seat may be engraved with a short phrase recalling the role that specific place played in the story being told.