To the Ghetto

I rose early as I found it hard to stay in bed. The persianne (shutters) do such a good job of  keeping the light out of your room that you really  can't tell what time it is. However ,by the time I had got up and dressed myself,  that child of  morning, rosy fingered dawn,  had already appeared and I was on my way.

Persianne (Shutters)

My plan for the day was to walk down to the ACTV office in piazzale Roma and buy a iMob card (annual public transport card).  Walking around Venice early on a sunny morning is a joy. However, the place is so saturated in stone that the glare and the summer sun makes it a tiring place beyond 10:30am. 

I walked out of my apartment and crossed over the first Rio (canal)

I stopped to look at the statues of the three moors in a local campietto (small square) - They're built into the side of a shop  which was once the atelier of  Tintoretto (it's still an artists workshop). The "Moors" are not moors at all but three members of a Greek merchant family so famed for their grasping rapacity that apparently  Mary Magdelane  came down from heaven  to  rebuke them personally. Here's one of them:

   

I walked down Fdmte Leonardo and bought  a travelling clock and  procured a photocopy of my passport  for the iMob card I wanted to purchase  and stopped at the  bookshop to buy a pad and a map of Venice (from the Venetian equivalent of the RACV).

I looked on as Signore Sarpi overlooked me:

And  contemplated a beggar on the steps of SS Lucia and Geremi:

               

 "Incipit de Lametatione  Hieronimo, Prophetae de Deus"

And looking at him I couldn't help but think that he looked like the prophet Jeremiah  prophesying the fall of Jerusalem:

"Where is she that was once so full of people?

The princess amongst the provinces?

O Jerusalem!,  Oh Jerusalem!, return to the Lord your God"

But to be completely successful he would have to be holding his right hand to right ear - that's how the direct line to the Lord  works in all the religious paintings I know....

SS Lucia and Jeremiah

I stopped to take a few photos at the ponte Scagliere and then, for a change walked across the  new  ponte Caltraversa. This bridge has been mired in controversy (in Venice any bridge across the Garand Canal will cause controversy), found the ACTV office and walked in to find -  to find Italians doing what Italians do so poorly - bureaucracy.   Take a ticket  and join the queue - but the ticket machine had run out of tickets. Never-mind try again  - I took ticket 152, twenty four on from the number of the person not being served at the head of the queue - the lady serving had disappeared. She comes back - grazie, madre del Dio! . Now the comedy begins:  In Italy everyone feels that they are a special case. An elderly gent rushes the head of the queue with a fifty Euro note waving above his head - "I just need to renew my card - gimme a form".  So with a quiet resignation born of long experience, the sad looking queue-wrangler hands him the form and his change.  A big mistake young lady! Because,  first one and then another, elderly Italian male , their sense of individual specialness affronted by the queue jumper's success jump the "trench" and head across the no-man's land of the gap between the head of the queue and the glassed

Ponte Scagliere

- in window of the "enemy" bureaucrat, demanding immediate service.

I give in - I leave  - but  "I will return!"  At 6am next   Monday morning equipped with a winning smile ready for a surprise attack on ACTV.

Already footsore and somewhat downcast by the easy  repulse of my attack upon public transport headquarters I repaired to the safe haven of the Ghetto - the original ghetto that is in sestiere  Cannaregio.

Back across the bridge of needles I turn left along the fundementa …… a pair of aged German ladies had set-up their easels to render the scene before them: A large boatload of vegetables being offloaded by three beefy blokes in shorts. The ladies were in raptures? "Oh the picturesqueness of it!, The wonder of my art! etc". The lads on the boat were not so impressed as they lugged the vegetables off the boat and proceeded to stack them around the artistes  - I particularly noted one beefy chap in blue shorts - snorting as he wiped the sweat from his brow and adjusted himself frowning in irritated amusement at the vegetable lugging/ pile arrangement puzzle that "die gnadige frauen" had posed him.

Five steps up and to the right, a low "sottoporto" (passageway under a building") opened into a narrow calle (alleyway) leading to the ghetto vecchio. 

A public notice engraved in stone warned that any converted Jew (i.e. Christianised Jew) who entered here and visited  a Jewish house would be severely punished and their property forfeit.  Anybody who denounced such "perfidious Jews"  to the authorities (for Venice was a police state) would be rewarded from the alienated property of the said  "criminal".

The Ghetto itself,  can only be entered by one of two bridges, once guarded at night by two Christian watchmen paid by the Jewish community.

The ghetto is small and peaceful, the apartments crowd up into the sky  and are  six or  seven stories high. The ghettos  house four synagogues - one for each of the four  communities of  Jews who lived here: the Ashkenazi, Tedesco, Spanish and Levatine temples.  As nothing is supposed to stand between the roof of a synagogue and the sky three of them are on the top floor  of the apartment blocks - the fourth (Levantine)  stands apart. 

As Venetian Jews were not permitted to work in "useful" trades, all of the buildings were designed  and built  by gentiles and as each of the communities was in fierce competition with all  the others there was a strong element of "Keeping up with the Ashkenazis" about the place  and consequently  the synagogues are each gilded  jewel-boxes  vying (across the centuries) to outdo each other. 

Commissioning  a Christian baroque artistic genius  to design and build your temple does have its downsides though - You  get something very much  like  a pulpit whether you like it or not. You want a five pointed  star of David decorative frieze? - I give you instead a byzantine Christian, four pointed knot symbolizing eternity and so on.

This was, I guess, rather  more about conflict between a patron and an artist  than  any kind of religious oppression. 

It is very peaceful here, but a little melancholy.  Somewhere around here, in the new ghetto, is where Shylock "lived" a who was forced to convert (and therefore leave) on peril of his life.  In front of me is a painful   sculpture: "il treno ultimo" - the last train.  It shows the Jews of Venice being herded at gun point onto one of the last trains to the camps.

Once Venice was home to  5,000 Jews - now there are 200….