Guglielmo Petroni House

Home of the writer Guglielmo Petroni, author of the book 'Il mondo è una prigione' (The World is a Prison), which recounts the thirty-three days he spent in captivity in Rome in the hands of Nazi-Fascist torturers between 3 May and 4 JuneIn Via del Panificio, a few steps from Sant'Agostino, the torture convent, lived Guglielmo Petroni, poet, writer. In 1938 the writer Curzio Malaparte invited him to Rome to direct the magazine 'Prospettive'. Having come into contact with anti-fascist circles, Petroni took part in the Roman Resistance.

Arrested in the spring of 1944, handed over to the SS and confined in Via Tasso prison, he was tortured and sentenced to death. Transferred to the prison Regina Coeli with the arrival of the Allies in Rome, he is saved from the death sentence and can return to Lucca. Once free again, he faces the arduous journey to his hometown in the grip of a sort of existential bewilderment and disorientation.  After this experience, between 1944 and 1945, Petroni wrote 'Il mondo è una prigione' (The World is a Prison), a book that, like few others, elaborates on the tragic experience of imprisonment.

A travel narrative through war-torn Italy that becomes a profound reflection on life and the human condition, when in the absence of understanding of others and reciprocal closeness, not only prison, but the whole world turns out to be a prison. Counted among the masterpieces of resistance literature, 'The World is a Prison' is in fact an absolute classic.