The historic Jewish cemetery in Pesaro, Italy, will reopen to the public in Spring 2026 after being closed for safety reasons since 2023. The cemetery is located in the Monte San Bartolo Park, and the reopening will follow the completion of restoration and stabilization work carried out by the park authority, which has managed the site since a 2005 agreement with the municipality.
The intervention—costing approximately €30,000 and to be completed by the end of this month — focused on clearing invasive vegetation and replacing deteriorated wooden steps with new oak structures along the lower 2,500 square meters of the 6,700-square-meter terraced burial ground. The road leading from the external panoramic route overlooking the Adriatic Sea to the entrance was also improved to enhance accessibility, while restoration of the entrance gate and the upper part of the cemetery is still pending.
“We were forced to close [the cemetery] because the wooden steps, combined with the steep terrain, made the ascent unsafe,” Silvano Leva, president of the San Bartolo Park authority, told local media during the event at the cemetery October 31 presenting the restoration work and announcing the reopening. “This work represents the first step toward making the site accessible again.”
The cemetery, established in 1695 by a flourishing Jewish community that included families from nearby Ancona and from Portugal, contains between 160 and 190 funerary monuments, located on a steep hill. Monte San Bartolo, overlooking the Adriatic. Today, there is no formally established Jewish community in the town, and any local Jews have been administratively affiliated with the Ancona Jewish community since the 1920s.
“The next step in the works will involve the highest part of the cemetery, near the panoramic road, where nothing has ever been done before. An extraordinary improvement is needed there, and we hope that the Municipality will also [economically] contribute,” Leva told local Rossini TV.
After reopening next spring, cemetery will be open to visitors from May 1 to September 30. There will be a guided visit scheduled once a week, with additional guided visits on request, and otherwise free public access. Representatives of the Pesaro section of the Ancona Jewish community and the Pesaro branch of FAI (the Italian National Trust), both long involved in supporting the site, welcomed the reopening.
Pesaro also has the beautiful Spanish Synagogue dating from the second half of the 16th century and founded by Jews who settled there after the expulsion from Iberia. The complex includes a mikvah and matzo oven and is open to visitors one day a week.
Before the current restoration, the cemetery was fully restored in 2001–2002 by the private Scavolini Foundation, after a long period of abandonment. It reopened to the public in July 2002.
That restoration included cleaning and consolidating all funerary monuments, creating pathways through the vegetation with steps and wooden walkways in the steepest areas, and trees on site. In addition, several funerary monuments were also restored at the time.
Watch a TV report about the announcement of the cemetery reopening and presentation of the current restoration work (in Italian)