Your descent into Hell is now complete. You have, in some way, met with Lucifer himself. Dante, the Supreme Poet, remains almost speechless in the presence of the rejected angel. Once reached the negative peak of Hell, it is only thanks to Virgil that the poet can reach salvation.

In this last room, the opportunity to look up and "see the stars again" is offered by the constellations painted in large format by two masters - this time, contemporary - Gerhard Richter and Anselm Kiefer.

But those who have lived Hell on Earth, and got through it, how have those survived? Matteo Lafranconi, director of Scuderie del Quirinale, in the essay that concludes the exhibition’s catalogue, compares the voices of great international writers and those of the witnesses to the great massacres of the twentieth century.

Fedor Dostoevsky, in Notes from the House of the Dead, tells of the hellish tsarist labour camp of Omsk in which he spent four years. According to the Russian writer, the lightness of a new beginning can only be achieved if, together with the physical chains, one also leaves behind the very memory of the horrors one has witnessed.

Similarly, the psychoanalyst Luciana Nissim Momigliano, survivor of Auschwitz, writes in her brief memoirs:

I like to think that I have turned the page. Auschwitz was a book of horror but I closed it and began another one of lightness and love.

The cost of this oblivion, of the inhibition of primitive feelings such as fear, shame and disgust, however, has a too high price for some. The "not-to-feel" - as described by the Hungarian pianist György Sebők who survived the Buchenwald camp - ends up anesthetizing every feeling, and complicates the processes of artistic creation.

Primo Levi writes that surviving Hell fills man with shame,

[the shame] which the just man feels before a sin committed by another. It troubles him that it exists, that it has been irrevocably introduced into the world of things that exist, and that his goodwill availed nothing, or little, and was powerless to defend against it. 

Along with shame, Levi speaks of an indelible shadow that creeps into the soul of the survivor and overpowers the feeling of salvation. After leaving Auschwitz, the writer was haunted by the idea that his new life was a dream, behind which the horror of the Lager remained as the only truth.

As Lafranconi notes, however, Levi rejects the solution of "not-to-feel". This reduces the individual to the state of a mere expression of his need to exist. Better an analytical approach in the face of evil, a "curiosity" to understand - at the cost of being cynical.

The refusal to cope by putting a "fire barrier" between oneself and Hell unites Levi to the Dutch writer Etty Hillesum, who died in Auschwitz in 1943. In her testimonies, which remained hidden for decades, Hillesum with extraordinary moral temper exhorts to re-establish a universal principle of humanity, and writes: “Ultimately what matters most is to bear the pain, to cope with it, and to keep a small corner of one’s soul unsullied, come what may.”

Hillesum found in the same years a counterpoint in the thought of Simone Weil. For the French writer and activist, post-war Europe should have abandoned the "language of rights". The problem with insisting on claiming rights, according to Weil, is that we slide towards resorting to force. Weil instead advocated a language of obligation, of duties that precede and underpin rights themselves. These obligations arise from respect intended as consideration and attention for every human being and for their needs, both physical and spiritual. 

Perhaps then, the stars mentioned by Dante, that light that in the darkest night elevates the frightened poet towards salvation, are nothing more than a projection of what is sacred in the human soul - goodness, beauty, justice and truth.