The History of the Jewish Ghetto in Florence: A Walking Tour with Context

Jews have been in Florence for over 500 years, but they didn‘t always have an easy time living here. On this walking tour with Context Travel expert, Paola Barbetti-Bohm, you‘ll follow in the footsteps of Florence‘s Jewish residents and discover the challenges they overcame throughout the centuries.

Your tour starts in front of the Belfredelli Tower in Oltrarno, the neighborhood where people first settled in the early Middle Ages, or perhaps even in Roman times. As you make your way over Ponte Vecchio to Piazza della Repubblica, you‘ll hear how, in 1437, Cosimo de‘ Medici permitted well-off Jewish families to set up bank counters from storefronts in Florence, encouraging them to settle in Florence‘s historic center. As you walk, Paola will tell you about the discrimination Jews faced when the wrong Medici brother gained power, the restrictions placed on them, and how they eventually started thriving in the city. You‘ll learn about their expulsion from Florence and other parts of Italy, and find out how, even once they’d been reintegrated into society, they faced anti-Semitic laws and deportation under Mussolini. While winding through Florence‘s streets, Paola will share the sad and shocking statistics about how few Italian Jews returned home after World War II. As you make your way to the Synagogue and Jewish Museum of Florence where our tour ends, you‘ll get a sense of the extent to which the history of Jews in Florence is buried just below the city’s surface.

On this tour, you‘ll also:

• Learn about the severe and humiliating restrictions placed on Tuscan Jews to discourage personal relations between Jews and Christians
• See how Ghiberti, a protagonist of the Renaissance, represented a few chapters of the Tanakh, the Hebrew Bible
• Discover how the Synagogue of Florence avoided destruction by the Nazi Army in 1944, and find out about the damage it endured during the Flood of Florence in 1966
• Hear about Gerhard Wolf who saved Ponte Vecchio from destruction and rescued political prisoners and Jews from persecution during the Nazi occupation
• Find out about the era when Jews obtained full civil rights and the ghettos were opened up in 1841
• Spot a few of the 104 Stolpersteine or Stumbling Stones, laid on streets in Florence to commemorate those murdered in concentration camps
• Meet key figures who fought to preserve Jewish culture, including Gerhard Wolf, Bartolomeo de Cases, Salomon Fiorentino, the Finzi family, Rabbi Nathan Cassuto and many more
• Learn about the post-unification period in Italy, when Jewish segregation was eliminated and Florence was chosen as the capital of the kingdom
• Get a grasp on how Mussolini and his Fascist regime led to Italy’s demise

By the end of this self-guided tour, you‘ll have a deeper understanding of Florence‘s Jewish ghetto, how Tuscan Jews have faced discrimination and prosecution over the years and how, when given the chance, they have thrived in spite of adversity.