ROME, November 9 (RIA Novosti) - Rome has become the world's first city outside Russia to name a street after Russian Nobel-winning author Alexander Solzhenitsyn.
Solzhenitsyn Street was inaugurated on Monday in one of Rome's largest parks, Villa Ada, under a decision taken by the municipal authorities on August 4, 2009, a year after the writer's death.
Solzhenitsyn, who fought in World War II, spent eight years in labor camps, and lived in exile for 20 years before returning to Russia after the fall of the Soviet Union, died of heart failure at the age of 89 on August 3, 2008.
Addressing the ceremony, Rome Mayor Gianni Alemanno said Solzhenitsyn was "not only a Nobel Prize winner in literature, but also a symbol of the fight against communism and human right violations."
Russia's ambassador to Italy, Alexei Meshkov, said the naming of the street reflected "the partnership and deep mutual understanding uniting the peoples and culture of Russia and Italy."
Speaking at the ceremony, the diplomat said President Dmitry Medvedev had proposed naming a street in central Moscow after Solzhenitsyn.
Best known for The Gulag Archipelago, a chronicle of his and thousands of other people's experiences in Soviet labor camps, Solzhenitsyn first received acclaim in Russia and the world during Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev's political "thaw." In 1962, his One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich - a numbing account of gulag life - was published by the Soviet literary journal Novy Mir.
