Roman Ghetto site features

It is a few short streets, and that is the point — the whole enclosure was three hectares. You can walk the length of the former ghetto in under ten minutes, and from its middle you can see where the wall ran in almost every direction.

The main street is wide, flat and lined on both sides with restaurants. Tables run out onto the pavement under awnings, the menus are in Italian and Hebrew as well as English, and the smell along it is frying oil.

At one end stand the ruins of an ancient portico — brick and marble columns, a broken pediment, several metres below the modern pavement level, with the street bending round them.

The buildings are tall for their width and close together, and the lanes between them are narrow enough to be dark at midday. On some walls, small brass squares are set into the pavement outside the doors.

At the river end the ground opens out and a large domed building stands over the embankment — square-planned, pale, with a squared dome unlike any church dome in Rome, visible from the far bank and from the bridges either side.

Three hectares

A trapezoid with river-parallel bases of 270 and 180 metres and sides of about 150. You can walk the perimeter in twenty minutes.

The line of the wall

Ponte Fabricio → Portico d'Ottavia → Via del Portico d'Ottavia → Piazza Giudea, which it cut in two, → Via del Progresso → the Tiber.

The eight gates

Two at first, three in the 16th century, five under Sixtus V, eight by the 19th — opened at dawn, closed one hour after sunset between November and Easter, two hours at other times.

The bill for the wall

300 Roman scudi, built under Giovanni Sallustio Peruzzi, and paid by the Jewish community.

The demolished churches

All the churches which stood in the ghetto were deconsecrated and demolished soon after the wall was built.

The word itself

Not called a ghetto at first but serraglio or claustro degli Ebrei — enclosure of the Hebrews. Modern Roman Jewish usage: ghétte.

The Museo Ebraico and the Tempio Maggiore

One ticket covers both, including a guided visit of the synagogue and a free QR audioguide in seven languages.

The museum's walk of the quarter

From Lungotevere de' Cenci to the Church of San Gregorio and Largo XVI Ottobre, by way of Via del Portico d'Ottavia, Via della Reginella, Piazza delle Cinque Scole and Largo Stefano Gaj Taché.

The quarter that replaced it

After 1870 the entire quarter was demolished and rebuilt above the level of the river. What stands now is four building blocks crossed by Via Catalana.