There’s a new resource for travelers wanting to explore Jewish heritage in Italy — a guidebook published by the Touring Club Italiano (TCI), Italy’s most important tourism organization, famed for its series of guidebooks, maps, and other tourism aids.
Published in cooperation with the Foundation for Jewish Cultural Heritage in Italy, the slim flexible paperback — “Viaggio nell’Italia ebraica” — is limited in physical scope but embraces smartphone technology by including QR codes that link to the Foundation’s much more extensive Visit Jewish Italy web site.
The book is structured around ten key places with significant Jewish heritage up and down the Italian peninsula — Torino, Venice, Trieste, Bologna, Ferrara, Florence, Rome, Trani (in Apulia), Bova Marina (Calabria), and Siracusa (Sicily). It provides information on each central city and briefly notes other places in some surrounding regions.
Jews have lived in Italy for more than 2,000 years, and the book mentions synagogues, Jewish cemeteries, museums, old Jewish quarters, archaeological sites, and Holocaust memorials — “a heritage of inestimable artistic and cultural value.”
(Strangely, Milan, home to Italy’s second largest Jewish community, is not on the list, though it has a large synagogue, monumental Jewish cemeteries, an important Holocaust memorial, and other infrastructure — and other cities in Lombardia region also have important Jewish heritage.)
The book is in Italian, but the Visit Jewish Italy we site — linked to by the QR codes provided for each section of the guidebook — has both Italian and English language versions and provides much more material on many more sites.
The book also includes a list of kosher restaurants and shops certified by the Jewish communities that come under the Union of Italian Jewish Communities. (That means, for example, that Chabad’s popular kosher establishments in Venice are not on the list.)
The guidebook’s authors are Annie Sacerdoti, one of Italy’s foremost authorities on Jewish heritage and Jewish heritage travel, and Baruch Lampronti, who also has extensive experience researching and writing about Jewish heritage and travel.
This is by no means the first guidebook to Jewish Italy, but inclusion as part of the TCI roster of guidebooks raises the profile of Jewish heritage as part of Italy’s heritage.
Sacerdoti wrote the first Jewish guidebook to Italy, a detailed guide published in 1986, with an updated version published in 2003. She also edited a series of individual guidebooks to Italy’s regions in the 1990s and early 2000s, and she was also instrumental in developing the Visit Jewish Italy web site. There have also been other tourist-oriented books on Italian synagogues and Jewish cemeteries.
Why buy the new guide book? the TCI asks on online shop page.
In Italy, Jewish cultural identity is expressed in more than 20 museums and permanent exhibitions, 60 synagogues, and around 100 cemeteries; in this guide the places that generate the strongest tourist interest for everything they represent in historical, cultural, and emotional terms. This heritage is increasingly opening up to travelers (around 50 percent students) interested in ‘living’ a more complete experience of Jewish culture in the form of an itinerary and meetings with the Jewish communities.
Here are some photos of some of the sites and sights included in the book:







