Ghetto Vecchio: the Levantine and Spanish Scole
Why is it significant?
Run your fingers along the stone of the passage as you come in from the canal, and you may feel the grooves where the hinges of a gate once hung.
Key Facts
| Place | Ghetto Vecchio: the Levantine and Spanish Scole |
|---|---|
| Address | Campiello delle Scuole, Ghetto Vecchio, Cannaregio, 30121 Venezia VE, Italy |
| Geo Coordinates | 45.44480, 12.32580 |
| Part of Walk | Venice Beyond the Crowds: Cannaregio and the Jewish Ghetto |
| Generated | Generated |
Run your fingers along the stone of the passage as you come in from the canal, and you may feel the grooves where the hinges of a gate once hung. Then the street narrows into a tall canyon of houses, and a little further on it opens into a small square with two buildings that do not look like synagogues at all... and that is exactly the point.
First, the word. In the Middle Ages this area held the city's copper foundry, where metal was poured, getto in Venetian, from gettare, to cast. When the foundry moved away, the name stayed on the land: the old foundry, the Ghetto Vecchio, and beyond the canal the new one, the Ghetto Nuovo. Jews arriving from Germany, the story goes, pronounced it with a hard g... and so a Venetian word for a metal workshop became the name for segregated quarters all over the world.
Confinement began in 1516, on the island across the little canal ahead of you. This street was added in 1541, when the Republic wanted to keep Levantine Jewish merchants, traders from the Ottoman East, in the city, and made room for them inside the walls. Later came Sephardic families of Spanish and Portuguese origin, many descended from people expelled from Spain in 1492. Each community built its own place of prayer, its scola, and kept its own rite, its own language and its own pride.
The two buildings facing each other are the Scola Levantina and the Scola Spagnola. From outside they are discreet: no domes, no towers, a careful modesty. Inside they are among the finest Baroque rooms in Venice, with carved wood, brass lamps and women's galleries above. Their seventeenth-century rebuilding is often linked to the workshop of Baldassare Longhena, the architect of the Salute. The Spagnola is the largest synagogue in the city, and both are still used for prayer, one in summer, one in winter.
Now look up at the houses. With nowhere to spread out, families built upwards, floor upon floor, with low ceilings squeezed between them. Walk on down the street, cross the bridge over the canal, and you will step out into a wide, open square... the place where it all began.