Our Curia Sant’Ambrogio is set in the midst of Rome’s Jewish Quarter. The technical and acceptable term for the area is, “the Ghetto,” which to American ears might sound derogatory or anti-Semitic, but if you ask the Jewish residents here, they will tell you they live in “il Ghetto Ebreico,” the Jewish Ghetto. Romans know what this means and where it is.
The Ghetto is in the heart of Rome, in what is called the “centro storico” of the city, that is, the historic center. It is the oldest Jewish community in all of Europe, dating back to before the birth of Christ, and remains today a thriving neighborhood of residents, Jews and Gentiles, as well as a place of living, commerce, worship and much more.
The official boundaries of the Ghetto were technically determined by papal decree of Pope Paul IV in 1555, locating it within what is called the “Rione Sant’Angelo,” (Saint Angel district), near the Tiber River that flows through Rome. The Ghetto is located just south of the famous “Campo de’ Fiori,” a beautiful piazza that has a daily outdoor market, where hordes of tourists flock each day. Fewer find their way to the nearby Jewish Ghetto, but those who do find plenty to see and enjoy.
At the time it was established, Rome’s Jewish quarter was considered one of the most undesirable quarters of the city because of constant flooding by the Tiber River. However, the area was already where eighty per cent of Rome’s Jewish population lived and those who didn’t were forced to move there.
In addition to determining boundaries for the Ghetto, the 1555 papal decree also established what professions Jews could and could not hold in Rome. One of the accepted works was the selling of fish. To this day some of the Ghetto’s street names reflect connection with fish selling.
Beginning in the sixteenth century the area of the Jewish Ghetto was walled in and eventually heavily populated. Despite the walls, the area was subject to regular flooding of the Tiber and outbreaks of malaria. Life there was far from attractive. Only in 1888 were the walls torn down and life improved. Once a place of crushing poverty, the Ghetto today commands some of the highest property prices in Rome.
Jewish life carried on in the Ghetto for centuries, but the saddest period was in the twentieth century, during the Nazi occupation of Italy during the World War II. Nazis entered the Jewish Ghetto on October 16, 1943 and deported nearly two thousand Jews, including Roberto Benigni’s father, whose plight inspired Benigni’s 1997 Oscar-winning film, “Life is Beautiful.”
Some of the Roman Jews who were deported survived the Nazi atrocities, including Benigni’s father, but only another dozen or so persons. In addition, some eight thousand Jews were hidden by non-Jews for the duration of the Second World War.
An elderly Jewish neighbor of ours tells of being hidden inside Sant’Ambrogio with some of his family members during the war. He is of course eternally grateful to the monks of our curia for saving their lives and is a good neighbor. The Oblate sisters of Saint Frances of Rome near our curia also hid Jews during the war, dressing some of the women as sisters. Many other religious houses in the city did so as well. I recommend seeing the film, “The Assisi Connection” about this work.
Visible signs of the tragic deportation of 1943 are a number of memorial plaques of stone on walls near the main Synagogue in the Ghetto. There are also brass markers outside the doors of a number of apartment buildings in the neighborhood. These smaller markers are on the tops of dark grey cobble stones of the streets, usually about four inches by four inches, almost like gold crowns on the top of a tooth. The ground plaques have the names of some of the people who lived in the apartment building and the day of their deportation in 1943. These markers are maintained and regularly polished.
Today the neighborhood is a pleasant place, which a stroll down the narrow streets testifies. Many fine restaurants, bakeries and other shops line the streets, as well as the great Synagogue, the largest in Rome and perhaps in all of Italy. It was completed in 1904 and the centerpiece of the Jewish Ghetto today, with the busy Lungotevere (literally, “along the Tiber”) Street, going right by the Synagogue with the Tiber River well below street level on the other side of the boulevard.
Because of some three hundred years of relative isolation, the Jews of Rome’s Ghetto developed their own dialect, known as “Giudeo-romanesco.” It is distinct from the rest of the Roman dialect and contains many words of Hebrew origin that became “romanized.”
I understand that most of our neighbors around Sant’Ambrogio are Jewish. There are approximately fourteen thousand Jews in the Eternal City today.
The Ghetto contains numerous multiple-storied apartment buildings, mostly dating from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The buildings create a certain “tunnel effect” for the narrow streets below, making canyons of brick, stone, glass and wood, where pedestrians feel somewhat dwarfed by the relatively tall buildings on either side of the streets.
As in many large cities today, people don’t seem to know each other well in the neighborhood and I’ve yet to see any “block parties,” but everyone I encounter on the streets is polite and friendly. As already mentioned, there are many apartments in the neighborhood that likely cost a pretty penny to rent or buy.
Near us, on ground floors, are some clothing stores, several bars, a few supermarkets, many restaurants, a print shop, a hardware store, a carpentry shop, book and souvenir stores, art galleries, a store that sells cloth, some Roman ruins as well as other religious Congregation headquarters, including us and the Sacred Heart Fathers and the Order of Mater Dei, the latter two Missionary orders of Catholic priests. There are also some Catholic churches in the neighborhood, all of this part of the current fabric of the historic Jewish Quarter or Ghetto, where I have now lived for the past year.
I never fail to be moved when I walk through the center of the Ghetto and reflect on all that has happened there.
