Campo del Ghetto Nuovo & the Holocaust Memorial

Why is it significant?

Step into the open space of Campo del Ghetto Nuovo and turn slowly in a circle. Wellheads, a few trees, benches, children on scooters... and around you, houses taller than almost anywhere else in Venice, seven and eight storeys of windows packed tightly together.

Key Facts

Open the walk

Step into the open space of Campo del Ghetto Nuovo and turn slowly in a circle. Wellheads, a few trees, benches, children on scooters... and around you, houses taller than almost anywhere else in Venice, seven and eight storeys of windows packed tightly together.

On 29 March 1516 the Venetian Senate decreed that the Jews of the city must live on this small island and nowhere else. The gates were closed at night and opened in the morning, boats patrolled the canals, and the community itself had to pay the Christian guards who locked it in. By day Jews worked in the city as moneylenders, second-hand dealers, doctors and printers. By night they had to be back inside. At its peak in the seventeenth century, several thousand people lived in this tiny space.

And yet the Ghetto was also a crossroads of the Jewish world, with German, Italian, Levantine and Spanish Jews living side by side. Look along the upper floors around the campo: three of the five scole are hidden up there, the Scola Tedesca, the Scola Canton and the Scola Italiana, recognisable only by a row of slightly grander windows. Learned Christians came to hear the sermons of the rabbi Leon of Modena. The gates came down in 1797, after the fall of the Republic, when French troops removed them and burned them in this square.

Now walk to the brick wall where you see bronze reliefs and strands of barbed wire. They are the work of the artist Arbit Blatas, a Holocaust memorial unveiled in 1980, and beside them are the names of the deported. In September 1943 Giuseppe Jona, president of the community, took his own life rather than hand over the list of its members. From December 1943 the Jews of Venice were hunted down, even the elderly from the community's own rest home on this campo. Two hundred and forty-six were deported. Only eight came back.

Stay here for a moment. Then cross the bridge on the north side of the campo, over the canal that for almost three centuries separated these people from their city, and come out onto the long, sunny fondamenta on the other side.