This first section is a brief explanation of my Italy blog posts, which were inspired by my 2-week trip to Italy in May, 2025. Feel free to skip this section if you’ve read it before.
Dear Reader, If you read my Italy posts in the order in which they’ve come out, it may seem as though we hopped back and forth all over the country, but I have decided not to write these posts sequentially. I want to write about the things that interest me most, as the spirit moves me. For some topics, I may even combine cities. I hope that by doing so, you’ll find it a lot more interesting than if I just give you a tedious day by day description of our itinerary, as if I were your Aunt Mabel forcing you to sit down and watch all her Super 8 films of the family road trip to Niagara Falls from 1966.
If you have any questions, comments or suggestions about how I’m approaching this travelogue-within-a-blog, please let me know in the comments below!
The first city we visited on our epic Italian vacation was Venice, and it was definitely my favorite. I felt cradled by its labyrinth of alleys, delighted by the unexpected things we’d encounter around every corner, and intrigued by how exotic it was compared to my everyday existence. In short, I fell madly in love with the place.
One thing that struck me about Venice was its many contradictions. You’d see preservation next to decay, beauty intertwined with grime, and above all, opulence comingling with destitution. It is that last contradiction that I want to talk about in this post.
It would be easy, with rose-colored glasses, to assume that all Venetians were and are rich. There are luxurious palazzos as far as the eye can see. The Doge’s palace was definitely not a tenement, nor was the home of Peggy Guggenheim. During the Renaissance, it was a strategic hub for maritime trade, banking and finance, and the place to go for glassware, textiles, and jewelry. It also attracted famous artists such as Titian, Tintoretto, and Veronese. It was a major stop on the Grand Tour, and at one point, its annual Carnival lasted for 6 months.
One Venetian monument to such opulence is La Fenice Opera House. I’m not an opera fan, but I became interested in seeing this opera house while listening to audio books about Italy in the year prior to our visit. One such book, which I highly recommend, is The City of Falling Angels, by John Berendt.
This book gives you as much insight into the quirky residents of Venice as his other book, Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil did into the residents of Savannah. The story revolves around the second time La Fenice burned down, and its subsequent restoration, in 1996. That main story spawns a lot of other mini-dramas, making the whole book overflow with chaos, corruption and crime.
La Fenice means The Phoenix, and it was aptly named. Since its original construction in 1792, it has burned to the ground and had to be restored twice. The first time was in 1836. The restoration after the 1996 fire was completed in 2004. After hearing about all the controversies surrounding that, I wanted to see how well they had done.
You can tour La Fenice, and it’s one of the few opulent places in Venice that you can generally walk up to and buy a tour ticket on the spot (within tour hours, of course). No advance reservations are necessary. Looking at it from the outside, you’d never anticipate the visual riches that lie within.
While there, you get to see historical posters of many famous operas that premiered there, as well as models of the building itself, and its other event rooms.
At the time we were there, at least, there was a Maria Callas exhibit. She was much beloved by Venetians in the years she sang there. In fact, La Fenice was the catalyst for a stylistic turning point in her career. She performed there from 1947 to ’49.
You also get an excellent view of the interior, including the opera boxes, the stage, and the ceiling, which is flat, but is supposed to give the optical illusion of a dome. (Meh. Not so much, in my opinion. But it was still pretty.)
As you walk around, you even get to step into the Royal Box, and learn about its controversies. When Venice was ruled by France, just a few short years after La Fenice was built, Napoleon came along and had the existing box destroyed and expanded, disrupting the beautiful curve of the interior. This of course infuriated the Venetians. When he finally left, their first priority during the next remodel was to undo what he had done. (May the same be said of the White House in the future.)
Looking out from this box, you can imagine seeing ladies in evening gowns and men in tuxedos awaiting the night’s performance with great anticipation. You can feel the presence of foreign dignitaries and heads of state. It is definitely not the type of place where the average citizen would feel right at home. Having said that, though, their website points out that La Fenice is at one of the lowest points in Venice, so people wishing to attend operas during high tides are encouraged to bring along rubber boots and/or waders. (I bet that takes the haute right out of your couture.)
But even as this gorgeous opera house takes pride of place in Venice, currently, there is a population decline in the city’s core. Rich foreigners have bought many of the houses, and rarely live in them, but they have driven up the cost of housing across the board. Other properties have been scooped up and turned into vacation rentals. The residents lament the lack of amenities and the decaying, damp buildings that are left for them. As the cost-of-living increases and the quality-of-life declines, many residents are moving to the mainland and only coming to Venice for work. This, in turn, has created a commuting nightmare.
It takes effort to find the homeless, the mentally ill and the beggars in Venice. They hide them well, for tourism’s sake. (During my first visit to Venice, I saw local law enforcement come blasting into a piazza, causing a crowd of African refugees who were selling Gucci handbag knockoffs to run for their lives.) But then, Venice has always been quite good at driving away or segregating its undesirables.
Recently, I wrote a blog post that discussed, in part, the historic segregation of Venice’s sex workers. Now, let’s talk about an even more disturbing segregation: The Venetian Ghetto.
Before taking this trip, I did not realize that the word ghetto originated in Venice. The most popular theory regarding the etymology of this word is that it comes from “giotto” or “geto”, meaning foundry. The ghetto’s location is where the old state bronze foundries used to be located.
Even before the Venetian Ghetto was established in 1516, Jews in Italy in general, and in Venice in particular, had been suffering under harsh restrictions since at least the mid 10th century. At that time, they were not allowed to live in Venice, but Jewish merchants and moneylenders could visit and work there. Venetian captains, however, were forbidden from taking them aboard their ships, so getting to and from Venice must have posed a challenge for them.
In 1252, they still were not allowed to live in the main part of the city, but they could live on one island on its outer edges. Working in Venice, for them, meant paying extra taxes on every transaction they made. Jewish moneylenders got to live in Venice in 1385, and they were given a Jewish Cemetery further out in the lagoon in 1386.
In 1394 the moneylenders were expelled from the city again, and only allowed to work there in two-week intervals. All others were forced to wear a yellow badge, and in 1496 this was changed to a yellow hat, and in 1500 a red hat. They couldn’t own land or build synagogues. Depending upon the city’s level of antisemitism, at various times they were forced to be baptized as Christians, and, due to rumors (false, of course) of blood libel in 1480 and 1506, some Jews were killed.
In 1516, Venice’s ruling council decided that rather than kick them out yet again, they would confine their residence to Ghetto Nuovo, a nasty little island in the Cannaregio District of the city. (Contrary to popular belief, despite the fact that the word ghetto comes from Venice, this was not the first established Jewish ghetto. Frankfurt, Germany has that dubious distinction.)
In Venice, 700 Jews, originally from Germany, Italy, and a few from the Levant, were relocated to 1.36 acres. For context, that’s a population density of 329,000/square mile. Manila, Philippines, which in 2025 is often cited as the most densely populated city on earth, is not even close to that crowded. To make things even more relatable, Manhattan currently has a population density of 70,825/square mile. So imagine Manhattan with 4.6 times as many people in it. Fuhgeddaboudit.
And to make matters worse, Ghetto Nuovo is basically a piazza surrounded by buildings. The piazza, at the time, wasn’t even paved as it is today, so it was very muddy and full of feces. Due to the crowding, and the fact that the people could not expand outward, they expanded upward, creating tenements that were 6-8 stories tall, and are considered some of the world’s first “skyscrapers”. Even with that upward expansion, they were crammed in, often 10 people per room, and they were forced to pay rent that was 1/3rd higher than other Venetians for the privilege.
Ghetto Nuovo was surrounded by a wall, and, while the Jews were allowed off the island from noon to 6pm each day, the gates to the only two bridges were locked after that, and there were severe penalties for anyone caught outside. A further humiliation for them was the fact that they were forced to pay the wages of the guards who kept them locked in, and also for the ones who would patrol the surrounding canals in boats.
Given the antisemitism in Venice, you have to wonder if the women and children left the ghetto very often. They did have schools and synagogues there. But imagine being trapped in that little muddy piazza, only able to look up at that one patch of sky your entire life, and never, ever having one second to yourself. This went on for about 280 years. (Which, in fairness, is about 100 years less than the segregation of the sex workers.)
On a more positive note, though, it was considered one of the leading Jewish communities in all of Europe, and had been negotiated by the Jews themselves, as they found it preferable to leaving Venice entirely. Over time, as more Jews came from all over Europe, and as they began to interact with other Venetian intellectuals, it became a Jewish cultural hub. Nearly 1/3rd of all Hebrew books printed in Europe before 1650 came from Venice. The ghetto was home to many renowned poets, writers and philosophers as well.
Sephardic Jews from Spain and Portugal moved into the Ghetto around 1541, and Venetian authorities had no choice but to expand the area by adding the Ghetto Vecchio. In 1633 the addition of the Ghetto Nuovissimo increased the size of the entire ghetto to 7 acres, or about 2 ½ city blocks. By then, a certain hierarchy had become evident. The Sephardic and Levantine Jews were at the top, the Germans were in the middle, and the Italians were on the lowest rung in the ghetto.
By this time, the population in the ghetto had risen to 5000 people. Even though the ghetto’s footprint had increased, the population density was now 457,000/square mile, which meant 128 square feet of living space per person. For context, at around the same time, dense, disease-prone London had a density of 60,000/square mile. Even the Warsaw ghetto, at its peak in 1941, had 300,000/square mile.
Venice is a port city, so it had its share of plagues and was host to every disease imaginable. It’s safe to assume that the situation was even worse in the ghetto. The residents were also restricted to a few types of employment: money lending at miserable rates, pawn and thrift shops, trading, and medicine. Most of the Jews of Venice lived in extreme poverty.
Given the health and economic conditions, by the time Napoleon took control of Venice in 1797 and tore down the gates to the ghetto, allowing the Jews their freedom, there were only 1,626 of them left. Most of them by that time were servants, rag and bone merchants, and shopkeepers. But there were a few families that had managed to become affluent, and they immediately departed for other parts of the city, where they bought palazzos that the regular Venetians could no longer afford. Many of the rest, however, chose to remain in the ghetto, perhaps due to their financial circumstances.
Venice in general was on the decline by then, which made it quite easy for Napoleon to take over and end the Venetian Republic. After Napoleon was done, Venice would never be the same again. But, hey, he did free the Jews, so he wasn’t all bad. Perspective.
From that point until all the way up to World War II, Venice, like most of the rest of Italy, was in a state of near constant political turmoil. During that time, Jewish rights would wax and wane. But at least the Jews of Venice were never locked inside that ghetto again.
When the Nazis occupied Venice in September, 1943, Giuseppe Jona, the president of the Jewish Community, committed suicide rather than give them a list of the Jews of Venice. Even so, eventually 246 Jews were taken, including 20 from a convalescence home, and most wound up in Auschwitz-Birkenau. Only 8 returned. There are two Holocaust memorials that remember the people who were lost to this community.
Today, fewer than 500 Jews live in Venice, and only 30 of them live in the ghetto. Many of them are Ultra-Orthodox Lubavitchers who claim to be real Venetian Jews, but most are actually from Brooklyn. It has simply become too expensive to live anywhere in Venice, for anyone.
Dear Husband and I visited Ghetto Nuovo after dark. While there were lights on in some of the upper floor windows, no one looked out, and we didn’t hear a sound. It felt as if the ghetto was completely deserted, which is probably a strange feeling, if places hold any residual energy from the past.
I’m not one to conjure ghosts, but if anywhere has earned the right to have them, it’s this place. And yet it felt oddly peaceful and safe. I stood, looking up at the many windows, imagining the hundreds of years of misery and desperation, and also the desire for broader understanding, and the wishes for better things for their children, and the impressive, inspirational perseverance in the face of such insurmountable odds.
At times like these I feel frivolous for having called anything in my life a serious problem. We didn’t take many pictures. It felt like a solemn occasion. Being a tourist in a place like this felt disrespectful. A fabulous supplement to our three pictures can be found here.
In 2016, Venice held a year-long celebration of the history of the Venice Ghetto since it was its 500th anniversary. During that event, Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice was performed in the square. Nearby, they held a Mock Appeal of Shylock v. Antonio, and Ruth Bader Ginsburg was the presiding judge. After hearing all the arguments, Ginsburg concluded that there had been several miscarriages of justice in the play’s original trial. She called for “restoring to Shylock his confiscated property, overturning the forced conversion and calling for the return of 3000 ducats lent to Antonio.”
But as we now know, nothing in the Venice Ghetto is ever that simple. Since Shakespeare’s play was brought up, it caused me to re-read it. (But don’t be too impressed. I found a version of it, here, that has a modern English “translation” next to Shakespeare’s original words. Because I love doing research for you, Dear Reader, but I don’t love you quite that much.)
I hadn’t read this play since high school. I was hoping that there would be more of a sense of the ghetto, where many of the scenes would have had to have taken place, but that wasn’t the case. But then, for the most part, Shakespeare was more about the words than the settings. And, too, there is no record of Shakespeare ever having set foot in Venice.
Shylock, perhaps the ghetto’s most famous resident, never existed outside of that play. The shocking antisemitic stereotypes in the play gave me pause, and would make me lose respect for the Bard had he not also included the famous “Hath not a Jew eyes?” speech. That he put both things in the same play makes me think he wanted to point out that even though those antisemitic sentiments were commonplace at the time and place where the play was written, and much of his play’s contemporary audience was guilty of possessing such sentiments, he gave Shylock the opportunity to demonstrate his own humanity, even if the author portrayed him, at the same time, as quite an unreasonable jerk. Shylock’s vengeful nature would have been even better understood if you really grasped the conditions under which he would have been living, and the way he would have been treated.
So, yes, it’s easy to think that Venetians were historically well off, as it is the rich who had time to leave behind documents and long-lasting, luxurious buildings such as La Fenice. But lest we forget, it is not the rich who built those buildings, nor, for that matter, were they the ones who produced the food or defended the city or kept it running. It was the poor. In fact, 90 percent of Venetians, historically, were part of the laboring classes. And a portion of them got locked away for 3/4ths of the day, and were most likely treated to Shylock levels of antisemitism with all the harsh living conditions that go along with it.
I find it interesting that the opulent La Fenice Opera House was built 5 years before Napoleon tore down the gates of the Venice Ghetto. (What a difference less than a mile makes in your life’s path, if only you’re allowed to take it.) That, and the hundreds of Renaissance palazzos scattered throughout the city, prove that there was great wealth flowing through the town while the Jews were made to suffer in squalor for all those years. It makes me love Venice a bit less. But I am grateful that its history is not being whitewashed. These stories need to be told.
Additional sources:
Venice’s Teatro La Fenice Opera House Place in History
Venetian Opulence: Wealth and Luxury in Renaissance Venice.
Pestilence, poverty, and provision: re-evaluating the role of the popolani in early modern Venice
Secular charity, sacred poverty: Picturing the poor in Renaissance Venice
Cultural heritage: the myth of Venice
Wikipedia—History of the Jews in Venice
Virtual Jewish World: Venice, Italy
The Centuries-Old History of Venice’s Jewish Ghetto
Hidden Venice: The Lagoon’s Jewish Ghetto
A Solo Traveller’s Ideal Five-Day Self-Guided Walking Itinerary in Breathtaking Venice.
Official Website of Jewish Community in Venice
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