Venetian Ghetto Site Features

The ghetto's buildings are the tallest in Venice, and the reason is the enclosure itself. A community confined to a fixed island that could not expand outward had to expand upward, so floors were added onto existing houses again and again -- producing blocks of six and seven storeys where the rest of the city rarely exceeds four.

Those added floors have unusually low ceilings, and the windows are small and irregular, because each layer was inserted into a height that was never designed for it. From the Campo di Ghetto Nuovo the effect is immediately legible: the square is ringed by facades noticeably taller and plainer than anything in the surrounding sestiere.

The five synagogues -- the scole -- are invisible from outside, and deliberately so. Venetian law barred them from looking like places of worship, so each was built into the upper floor of an ordinary building, identifiable only by a slightly larger run of five windows marking the prayer hall. The interiors are the opposite: gilded, panelled, with elliptical women's galleries and bimah and ark set at opposite ends of the room.

The two original gates that sealed the island at night are gone, burned in 1797, but the openings they closed are still visible where the bridges land on the campo.

Five synagogues survive from the ghetto's different communities: the Scuola Grande Tedesca (German), Scuola Canton (also serving Ashkenazi Jews), Scuola Italiana (Italian), Scuola Levantina (Levantine Sephardic), and Scuola Spagnola (Spanish and Portuguese). Several can only be visited on a guided tour through the Jewish Museum of Venice, which sits on the ghetto's main square, the Campo di Ghetto Nuovo.

The ghetto occupies a small island in Cannaregio, in the northern part of the city, ringed by canals on every side -- which is precisely why it was chosen. An island with two bridges could be sealed at night by closing two gates, and the surrounding water did the rest of the work.

It sits well away from the ceremonial city. The walking routes between the station, the Rialto and San Marco all pass to the south, so the ghetto is reached by turning off them deliberately rather than by passing through, and the streets around it stay quiet.

The Campo di Ghetto Nuovo at its centre is unusual among Venetian squares in having no church and no well-head as its focus. It is a plain, wide, hard-surfaced space enclosed by tall flat facades, with the Holocaust memorial reliefs along one wall and the Jewish Museum on another -- a square that reads as a room rather than a crossroads.

The district divides into three parts of different dates: the Ghetto Nuovo of 1516, the Ghetto Vecchio added in 1541 for Levantine merchants, and the small Ghetto Nuovissimo of 1633. Confusingly, the "new" ghetto is the oldest of the three -- the names refer to the age of the foundry sites, not of the Jewish settlement.