Le Stumbling Stones they are stones that are part of a European project by the German artist Gunter Demnig in memory of citizens deported to Nazi extermination camps.
The initiative is born in the 1995, in Cologne and continued slowly in Germany, Austria, Hungary, Ukraine, Czechoslovakia, Poland, the Netherlands and Italy. At the beginning of 2010, more than 22.000 "stones". The stones have the size of a sampietrino, therefore 10 × 10, different for the upper surface, at street level, because of shiny brass.
On them are engraved: name and surname of the deportee, age, date and place of deportation and, when known, date of death. These stones want to be gods visual 'stumbles' because they want to force the distracted pedestrian to stop and read and remember.
The day and time of the placement of the stones is announced to the tenants of the building from a letter from the Municipality in which it is explained that the project aims to "remember the inhabitants of the neighborhood killed and persecuted by the fascists and the Nazis, deportees, victims of the criminal program of euthanasia or object of persecution because they are homosexuals". The stumbling block is not physical but visual and mental, it forces those who pass by to question themselves about that diversity and the current inhabitants of the house to remember what happened in that place and on that date, continuously intertwining past and present, memory and current events .
