A new virtual reconstruction at Rome’s Jewish Museum lets visitors “tour” the historic Roman ghetto.
Pope Paul IV confined Jews in a walled ghetto in 1555. Sited low on the bank of the Tiber, it was a squalid, densely populated and unhealthy quarter subject to flooding and disease. (The most graphic description was by the German historian Ferdinand Gregorovius, written in 1853.) The ghetto was finally abolished only in 1870, after the defeat of papal rule and incorporation of Rome into Italy; by the end of the century, the old medieval quarter had been razed as part of an urban renewal project that included an embankment of the Tiber and the erection of the Tempio Grande, or Great Synagogue.
The virtual reconstruction, now part of the Rome Jewish Museum, takes you on a 3-D “tour” of the main ghetto as it was — architecturally — before it was razed. This introductory trailer, though, doesn’t show the squalor!
A Jewish community archivist, Giancarlo Spizzichino, discovered material showing that there was a second, smaller Ghetto, or “Ghettarello” established at the same time. Archaeological work was carried out there at the end of the 1990s — but work was halted years ago for lack of funds.
As Haaretz reports in a recent article:
According to the papal census of the time, there were 4,060 Jews living in Rome, of whom 180 families – many of them poor – lived and worked in the Ghettarello, as did some Catholics. The Ghettarello also had a synagogue, Porta Leone.
Spizzichino found the story of the Ghettarello, also known as the Macelletto, in a folder titled “Miscellanea”.
Based on a 18th century map by an Italian architect of the time, Giambattista Nolli , the long-forgotten ghetto was located on the Mount of Savello, next to the Church of Saint Gregorio alla Pietà. It was not far from the Great Synagogue of Rome, the city’s main synagogue today. […]
The Ghettarello ruins are still visible today. Excavations have uncovered two streets covered of Rome’s 16th century typical kind of pavement named the sampietrini, an oven likely used to bake matza, the gate to a courtyard, the foundation of a palace, a Roman column and a drinking trough from the stables. The entrance to the Ghettarello remains buried, under a small fenced garden. It will probably stay that way, at least unless more funds are found for digging.