Pitigliano: Little Jerusalem

Wednesday, October 21, 2015

Pitigliano

We left Florence at a late 8:15 AM for Rome, with a stop at Pitigliano on the way.  Of course, on the bus we finished the talk about the relationship of the Jews to the Medicis, the Church, and the civil Florentine authorities.

Pitigliano is a small Tuscan hill town which was a refuge for Roman and Florentine Jews when the ghettos were imposed.  It began as an Etruscan city and has beautiful and substantial walls:

It is a vertical place:

A part of the city is dubbed “Little Jerusalem”:

It is here where the remnants of the Jewish community have been turned into a museum.  We met there with a remarkable woman, Elena Servi, who is a member of one of the remaining six Jewish families (26 people) in Pitigliano.  

She related her history during WW II, as many of the town’s Jews were saved by fellow townspeople and farmers in the countryside, at great risk to themselves.  A number of these people are honored at Yad Vashem.

We toured the museum and learned of life for the Jews in the town.  Here’s the remaining bread oven:

We went to the synagogue which was fully functional with a resident rabbi until 1938.  A note about Jewish edifices in Italy: all of them, every single one, even in a small hill town in the middle of nowhere, have a military presence guarding them  This has been an Italian government policy ever since a terrorist attack against the Great Synagogue of Rome in 1982.  In the photo below note the soldier:

The interior is lovely:

There is a plaque commemorating a visit by the Grand Duke in 1822:

The Jewish cemetery is outside of the walls, down below:

After our delightful visit we boarded the bus for the trip to Rome, which took up the rest of the day.