The Risorgimento Square Shelter, reopened in 1995, is one of the public shelters built by the municipality using anti-bombing techniques and is among the largest in size, with an area of about 550 square meters. Built of reinforced concrete and placed at a depth of 12 meters, it consists of three parallel tunnels 4 1/2 meters wide and 40 meters long, connected by eight passages. For more than a year from the beginning of the war, to defend the population from incursions, thousands of linear meters of trenches were dug on public land, which only by December 1941 were demolished due to obvious ineffectiveness. As of December 15, 1944, Turin’s public shelters could accommodate 46,402 people. The shelters called home shelters, indicated by a white “R” near the door, were divided into two categories: normal and circumstance shelters. The former numbered 955 and could accommodate 41,222 people; the latter – real traps – numbered 15,076. Adding up the capacities of the real shelters and the normal home shelters (all of which were anti-crash), only 15 percent of the population could be said to be sheltered.
