PITIGLIANO, Italy — The olive groves and vineyards give way to dense vegetation, suitable for wild boars. The narrow, curving road climbs around hairpin turns. Then suddenly, coming into view like a Renaissance version of The Shining, the walled city of Pitigliano fills the skyline.
The yellow stone dwellings cling to each other above yellow volcanic rock so bare it could be the bones of a giant skull. The panorama is stunning - a hilltop stronghold rising above ravines, protecting the fertile Tuscan interior from interlopers.
Two hours south of Siena, this carefully preserved, ancient city remains somewhat removed from Tuscany’s well-traveled tourist routes, at least for Americans.
Standing out against the jumble of houses lining the edge of the walled city, two giant arches support the Medici aqueduct. Once through the arched stone entrance, the road opens onto the Orsini fortress palace, a 16thcentury modernization of an earlier medieval fortress. This was the local Orsini command center for the independent fiefdom defying the Grand Duchy of Tuscany to the north and the Papal States to the south.
Power players in medieval and Renaissance Italy, with their private armies and wealth, the Orsinis dared to defy the pope. A patron of religious tolerance and economic development, Count Niccolo Orsini welcomed Jews to Pitigliano in the mid-1500s when papal encyclicals forced Jews into ghettos in the Papal States, followed by Florence and Siena. The newcomers brought banking connections along with artisan skills.
When the house of Orsini lost Pitigliano to the Medicis, the ghetto went up, with Jews restricted to a few streets around the synagogue. But Jewish life continued to flourish in the 1600s as more Jews sought refuge.
By the mid-19th century, the Jewish population of some 400 was roughly 15 percent of Pitigliano. (Pitigliano’s total population currently numbers 4,000.) Later in the 19th century, when Italy lifted restrictions on Jews, most left for the big cities. Even with the declining population, until the arrival of fascism and Mussolini’s racial laws, Pitigliano prided itself on the harmonious integration of Catholics - mostly farmers - and Jews, who were artisans and shopkeepers.
PRESERVING THE PAST
Today, the sound of bells from the ancient stone watch tower mixes with the grinding of gears of motor scooters and tinny Fiats roaring up the inclines. In warm weather, the outdoor cafe across from the Orsini palace is a showcase for insouciant Italian males and women holding babies and balloons along with an aperitif of Prosecco. In the evening, the elderly set down their folding aluminum beach chairs in the narrow streets outside their homes for neighborly conversation.
Free rock concerts may blast the palace walls in summer but the municipality of Pitigliano and the Province of Grosetto in the Region of Tuscany carefully preserve Pitigliano’s past.
Wander down the maze of cobbled streets, under arches and past weathered wood doors with heavy, rusting locks. Follow the worn stone steps under window boxes and past tubs of petunias and begonias. The alleys end in brilliant views of the surrounding countryside.
In the ghetto (indistinguishable today from the rest of the old city), the synagogue and its underground maze with an oven for baking matzo (unleavened Passover bread), the remains of the mikvah ritual bath, a kosher butcher, and “cantina” for pressing and storing kosher wine preserve the Jewish past. A small museum is a new addition.
An elegant and curvaceous Italian beauty, the synagogue was built in 1598 and lovingly restored in the 1990s. Its rounded wood lectern and carved pews have been meticulously reconstructed, along with the gray-and-white marble floor. Spidery chandeliers hang from the ceiling.
Miraculously, in the 1960s, when walls of the abandoned building collapsed into the ravine, the women’s gallery survived. Once again visitors can climb the stairs for the female eye view of the synagogue through the elaborately carved wooden screen.
One of only three Jews still living in Pitigliano, Elena Servi is the spirit behind what remains of Jewish life. The last matzo was baked in 1939, and the last Yom Kippur service was held 20 years later.
Born in 1930, Servi does not gloss over the dark days of Mussolini’s laws, when only 60 Jews remained, or the darker days of the Nazi occupation. A plaque in the synagogue courtyard memorializes the 22 Pitigliano Jews who died in concentration camps.
SAVED FROM CAMP
But Servi, speaking through an interpreter, also recalled how farmers hid her family during a snowy December, “until people in town reported them to the police.” The farmers who risked sheltering them found another hiding place and eventually the family survived in a cave.
In one of the many complexities of history, it was the Pitigliano municipality that restored the synagogue, completed in 1995 with the help of the Jews in the port city of Livorno. Associazione La Piccola Gerusalemme (The Association of Little Jerusalem), of which Servi is president, is made up of Catholics and Jews.
Merchandising tradition, Tre Quarti (3/4), a tiny shop along Vicolo Marghera, the alleyway leading to the synagogue, sells traditional Jewish baked goods and La Piccola Gerusalemme, Pitigliano kosher wine.
Panificio del Ghetto, a bakery built into the gloomy tunnel-like arch at 167 Via Zuccarelli, just before the alley tothe synagogue, specializes in Pitigliano’s traditional Jewish breads and pastries, now considered totally Italian. A recent attempt at producing kosher olive oil was short lived, but a sign in Italian on Via Goito points the way to the remains of the Jewish community’s old olive oil press.
The ghetto is hardly isolated from the rest of Pitigliano. Broad steps worn with age lead from the synagogue’s gated entrance directly up to church offices on Via Roma, next to the Cathedral of Saints Peter and Paul. Via Zuccarelli, the main street of the ghetto, and Via Roma converge at the Church of San Rocco (originally named the Church of Santa Maria), Pitigliano’s patron saint. The church is one of Pitigliano’s gems, built tofit neatly into the trapezoid where the two streets meet.
The museum in the Orsini palace puts the times in perspective. The basement torture chamber is filled with apparently well-used weapons of human butchery, including skull-squeezing irons.
On a more civilized note, the palace compound includes a small Etruscan museum (ask for the card with English translation). The elegant ceramics bespeak a civilized joy in living by the area’s first settlers, who brought grapes and wine to Italy in the ninth century B.C.
NOTHING KOSHER HERE
Wine shops are still stocked with the region’s outstanding offerings. Restaurants abound, making the most of superb Italian produce.
In the spirit of Little Jerusalem, some promote “classical local Jewish dishes” with the unlikely label “goym” (Hebrew for gentiles). One of Pitigliano’s Jews explained the perplexing concept as nonkosher Jewish food. Thisseems to include the totally nonkosher wild boar, a local favorite going back to the Etruscans.
Outside the city walls, within walls of its own shaded by towering cyprus, the Jewish cemetery dates to the1500s, when Count Niccolo Orsini gave a patch of land to his personal doctor, David De Pomis, to bury his wife.
Symbolic of Little Jerusalem’s melding of Christian and Jewish cultures, a delicately sculpted statue of a girl reclines on tasseled pillows. She marks the tomb of a beloved child who died young - remembered right down to the details of her necklace of tiny round beads (pearls, perhaps) and the winglike folds of the sleeves of her dress.
While graven images are forbidden in Jewish tradition, Pitigliano’s Jews clearly borrowed from their Catholic neighbors. The child was the “Adoratissima Carla,” daughter of Temistocle Sadun, the head of the Jewish community who was also the engineer who brought electricity to Pitigliano.
A fitting celebration of centuries of cooperation, at night the city walls and yellow bedrock are bathed in light, the golden Little Jerusalem seemingly floating in time and space.
Travel, Pages 50 on 01/09/2011