Italy marks the Giorno del Ricordo every year on 10 February. Italy on Tuesday commemorates the victims of the Foibe mass killings in Friuli-Venezia Giulia, Istria and Dalmatia by Tito's partisans, both during and after world war two. Italy's president Sergio Mattarella and prime minister Giorgia Meloni will attend a memorial ceremony at the Italian parliament in Rome on Tuesday to remember the victims of the Foibe killings which occurred in 1943 and again in the weeks before and after the end of the war in 1945. The massacres were committed mainly against the local ethnic Italian population by Yugoslav communists who occupied the Istrian peninsula during the last two years of the war. The exact number of victims is unknown but there may have been up to 15,000 killed, with many of them tortured, shot or pushed to their deaths into the deep, narrow carsic sinkholes or chasms known as foibe. The Giorno del Ricordo commemorates the victims of the ethnic cleansing as well as the exodus of Italians who left their homes in Dalmatia and Istria in the years after 1943. Political contention in Italy The annual commemoration is embraced by the Italian right which has sought to draw comparisons between the mass murder of Italians by Communist-led anti-fascists with the Holocaust. Ahead of the memorial event on Tuesday, Italy's right-wing premier Meloni recalled a "painful chapter in our history, victim for decades of an unforgivable conspiracy of silence, oblivion and indifference." She paid tribute to "the martyrs of the Foibe" and the exodus of "hundreds of thousands of Italians who chose to abandon everything rather than give up their identity." "The nation must not be afraid to face that truth, casting aside any squalid attempt at denial or reductionism" - Meloni stated - "Remembrance is not resentment, but justice. It is the foundation of a shared memory that unites and strengthens the national community, paving the way for those who come after us." Train of Remembrance A special Treno di Ricordo will depart from Trieste on Tuesday and make its way slowly to Sicily, evoking the journey of the exiles from Istria, Fiume and Dalmatia. The train, which hosts a multimedia exhibition charting the tragedy of the Foibe and the exodus, will pass through 11 Italian cities: Trieste, Pordenone, Bologna, Pescara, L'Aquila, Rome, Latina, Salerno, Reggio Calabria and Palermo before arriving at its final destination in Siracusa. In Rome, the train can be visited at Ostiense station on 19 February from 13.00 to 18.30 and on 20 February from 09.00 to 18.30. On Tuesday, flags at the parliament in Rome will be flown at half mast, while that night the building's façade will be illuminated with the colours of the Italian flag.