A Return to Pitigliano, the "Little Jerusalem" Between Rome and Florence

Pitigliano, Italy. The synagogue juts out towards the gorge at the far left. Photo: Samuel Gruber 2025.

Pitigliano, Italy. The synagogue sits above the gorge. What we see here is all rebuilt. Photo: Samuel Gruber 2025.

 

Pitigliano, Italy. Synagogue. View of restored prayer from entrance to Aron ha-kodesh. Photo: Samuel Gruber 2025.

A Return to Pitigliano, the "Little Jerusalem" Between Rome and Florence

by Samuel D. Gruber

I've been to the Italian town of Pitigliano several times, but until last month, I had not been since 2002. On my previous visit, the late 16th-century synagogue, which had been destroyed in a landslide in the 1960s,  had been rebuilt and reopened, but the intriguing expansive underground spaces used by the Jewish community for several centuries were not yet accessible to the public. They are now, as part of the small museum "La Piccola Gerusalemme".

A few weeks ago, I revisited the town with my sister Ruth Ellen Gruber (editor of Jewish Heritage Europe), meeting up with new friends, Rabbi Mark Glickman and his wife Caron, of Calgary, Canada. It was after the Christmas-New Year holidays. The town was quiet; almost empty (we didn't know, but apparently on Tuesdays most restaurants and shops are closed). The only other visitors to the synagogue when we were there in the afternoon was an Israeli couple. In the summer, however, we were told there can be a thousand visitors a week.

Interest in Pitigliano’s Jewish history and culture began to revive in the 1980s, – largely due to the publication in 1981 of a history-based cookbook by Edda Servi Machlin, that brought international attention to the town. Machlin’s The Classic Cuisine of the Italian Jews: Traditional Recipes and Menus and a Memoir of a Vanished Way of Life, stimulated efforts to rebuild the synagogue for historic purposes, but also tourists – mostly Jews – began to trickle into Pitigliano, hoping to find evidence of the life and food of which Machlin wrote. This was the time of my first visit to the town sometime in the mid-1980s. Machlin’s book also includes a short memoir of her growing up Jewish in Pitigliano under Fascism. Her father was the last leader for the Jewish Community and imparted many of the communities Jewish values and traditions. Her memoir is informative and bittersweet – not like the tasty sfratti, for which Pitigliano is known. These were Jewish honey and walnut sticklike pastries made especially for Rosh Hashanah, but delicious year round. Christians adopted the pastry, too, as a special wedding treat. Rabbi Glickman bought some at the Museum shop, and these were much enjoyed. 

Pitigliano, Italy. Via Zuccarelli that leads to the synagogue is actually one of the wider streets in the town. Photo: Samuel Gruber 2025.

Pitigliano is one of the most beautiful towns in Italy, especially when seen from a distance. It is built on top of a tufa ridge between two deep gorges. Any view towards the city or from it is literally “gorgeous.” Tufa is a soft volcanic stone, the result of accumulated volcanic ash deposits. It is a soft stone that is easy to quarry and cut, but it has the admirable quality that when it is exposed to air it hardens making it also useful as building stone. Etruscan tombs and Roman catacombs are all carved out of the underlying tufa. 

Many of the tufa towns of northern Lazio and southern Tuscany like Orvieto and Pitigliano - date back at least to the Etruscan period of about 2,500 years ago. For millennia, occupants have created caves, corridors, and whole caverns within the rock, and when doing so they've used the quarried stone to build structures above. Today, in many of these towns one can explore the “underground" parts of these settlements. For centuries these spaces were not secret or exotic; they were part of everyday life and served very functional purposes. Occasionally, people lived in these spaces like troglodytes, but mostly the underground rooms were work spaces, storage spaces, and animal stalls and stables.  Some, like the matza bakery in Pitigliano, were cut deep in the rock, but were lit by rock-cut windows overlooking the gorge. Now these spaces are open to the public, but some have been reinforced with concrete for safety.

Pitigliano, Italy. Restored matza bakery. Photo: Samuel Gruber 2025.

There were Jews in Pitigliano in the late Middle Ages (and probably earlier). The community would have been small, like those throughout towns of Central Italy, where a single extended Jewish family might provide financial or medical services to the Christian community. In Italy, there were rarely Jewish farmers, but large towns had Jewish artisans, though these usually served the Jewish community. Mostly Jews in Italy were forbidden or at least restricted in these professions, especially after the Fourth Lateran Council of 1215, but enforcement varied greatly from town to town, and decade to decade. The smaller the number of Jews, the more likely they were to be accepted and even integrated into local (Christian) society, though tolerance and acceptance could shift quickly due to changes in politics and trends in Christian observance, especially the rise of the preaching friars (Franciscans and Dominicans) in the 14th and 15th centuries, would lead to greater Jewish isolation, and eventual ghettoization. 

Jews came to Pitigliano as refugees from Rome and elsewhere in Italy where in the mid-16th century they were being confined to ghettos under Papal order. Pope Paul IV had founded the Rome, Ancona and (short-lived) Bologna ghettos in 1555-56. All Jews living in the Papal States were forced to live in these few select places under oppressive rules. Many Jews fled papal territory. The easiest place to go was a short distance north to a small independent territory ruled by the Orsini counts, tucked just between papal ruled Lazio and the Medici-ruled Grand Dutchy of Tuscany.

In 1556, just a year after the establishment of the Rome ghetto Nicholas the 4th Orsini donated land in Pitigliano to his personal physician David de Pomis, for the creation of a Jewish cemetery. This signaled Orsini's willingness to protect the small Jewish community of Pitigliano and to allow refugees from Rome to settle. The establishment of a cemetery suggested a level of permanence that was unexpected in Italy at this time, and evidence of the growing community is that the synagogue was built in 1598.

Things changed however when the Orsini lands were added to the Grand Duchy of Tuscany in 1608. At that time the Medici ruler opposed the Pope and had not yet fully succumbed to pressures to confine the Jewish population.  Though not the subject here, Tuscany would have a checkered history both confining and supporting Jews. The policies were mostly self-serving. Sephardi Jews were allowed great freedom in their community in Livorno because of the commercial activity and wealth they brought to the Grand Duchy, but in Florence itself in large part to appease the Pope a ghetto was established in 1571. But the Florence ghetto – unlike Rome – was more an exercise in economic exploitation than oppression and religious coercion.

La Piccola Gerusalemme

In Pitigliano Jews adapted as part of their Community Center underground spaces that for centuries would serve as a mikveh, a matza bakery, a kosher butchery, a wine storage area, and other community needs. Jews did not live in these spaces, and some – like the bakery – seem only to have been used on an annual basis. Today these spaces are united together with exhibitions in a local Jewish museum called “La Piccola Gerusalemme (the little Jerusalem), though in fact for centuries it was the many of the buildings covering a multi-block area above ground that was the actual Jewish quarter (and for a long time an official ghetto).  The museum complex is owned by the municipality of Pitigliano but operated by a private foundation that also has ties to Italian Jewish communities. 

Pitigliano, Italy. This underground housed the mikveh. Photo: Samuel Gruber 2025.

 The Synagogue

The synagogue was built in 1598 with funding from Leone de Sabato, a local Jew. The building collapsed in the 1960s and it was rebuilt in 1995 with funding from the municipality of Pitigliano. This was not the first restoration. The roof collapsed in 1757 and was rebuilt. The architecture of the reconstruction is not as detailed as the original, as can be seen in surviving photographs. It approximates the experience of the space. Restored inscriptions on the walls and some surviving inscribed marble plaques provide some of the history of the building and notable activities that have taken place there over the centuries.  There is a plaque commemorating Lt. Gino Bemporad, killed in World War I.

We cannot experience the spirit of the place, as the original furnishings, which were treated with such reverence, are now gone. But Edda Servi Machlin evokes the warmth and awe of the place when she describes her father’s process – almost a ritual – of lighting synagogue lamps before Shabbat.,

“After enjoying our delight in tasting the fresh new fruits, my father would rush to temple where, with the help of the shamash (the temple caretaker and assistant), he would prepare about 200 oil lamps that were to be lit just before Arvit, the evening prayer. There were six huge bronze chandeliers hanging from the high vault, and four standing at the four corners of the Teva (the raised platform from which the Torah is read), each holding 20 glasses filled half with water and then to the brim with oil. On the oil floated a small tin triangle with a hole at the center, and with each of its sharp corners inserted into a small piece of cork. In the hole at the center was a wick--held in place by tiny plywood disc--which fueled the flame but did not itself burn. When the supply of oil was used up, the water would extinguish the flame. The amount of oil was measured to last from 1 sundown to the next so that the lights would begin to go out soon after the Havdala (literally, separation, in Hebrew),( the ceremony at the end of Shabbat. These oil lamps, in the shiny bronze chandeliers, projected a warm, golden light which created an intimate, festive, indescribably rich atmosphere.” (p. 43)

She also describes the special arrangement of memorial lamps in the synagogue on Yom Kippur:

“The temple was decorated in white to symbolize the purity of conscience, and in addition to the usual Shabbat light to the chandeliers and the Tamid (perennial light in front of the arc of the Torah scrolls, which was kept alive by adding olive well to it every morning before Shachrit) there was one oil lamp flickering for each member of the community who had passed “to a better life” in the past few decades. The Renaissance wood panels of the western wall of the temple had a built-in shelf that ran the width of the wall, which was crowded with these oil lamps, each representing one name. During the Kol Nedarim the names were mentioned one by one, noting their relationship to the living members. All the services in Pitigliano were conducted entirely in Hebrew, including the reading of those names.” (p. 49-50)

Here account of girl’s experience of the synagogue is also telling.  She was trapped in the women’s gallery for the service, but afterwards girls and boys were social in the little piazza outside.

“Of course, during services, we were relegated to the matroneo--the dark upstairs gallery with a carved wooden baroque grate painted in gold leaf, which was reserved for women--and the boys could not see us. But as soon as the Thirteen Articles of Faith, or yigdal, a song that was sung at the end of the service, was over, we ran down to the piazzetta where we giggled and squirmed and shook hands and wished Shabbat Shalom a peaceful and wholesome Sabbath to one another before going home for dinner.” (p. 44)

 

Pitigliano, Italy. Synagogue. View of the Matroneo (women's gallery), separated by an ornate wooden grille. Photo: Samuel Gruber 2025.

Officially, the synagogue of Pitigliano, even though it is not regularly used, is today affiliated with the Jewish community of Livorno, with which the community always had ties.

In 1622, the Medici got around to instituting a ghetto in Pitigliano, too.  Despite the restrictions of a ghetto the Jewish community flourished in Pitigliano, so much so that in the 19th century about 1/4 of the town's population was Jewish, Earning the town the sobriquet - bestowed by the Jews of Livorno - of “the Little Jerusalem.” One indication of the relatively liberal attitude the Medici took to the Jews of Pitigliano, was the fact that the grand Duke Peter Leopold visited the synagogue when in the town in 1773 and he declared in his diary that the synagogue was “all gilded stucco work and well designed.” 

 

Pitigliano, Italy. Synagogue. Inscriptions on the read wall commemorate events in the life of the synagogue. Photo: Samuel Gruber 2025.

Pitigliano, Italy. Synagogue. View of the Matroneo (women's gallery), separated by an ornate wooden grille. Photo: Samuel Gruber 2025.

Pitigliano, Italy. Synagogue. This inscription (restored) marks the visit of Grand Duke Ferdinand III in 1823.. Photo: Samuel Gruber 2025.

Subsequently, Grand Dukes Ferdinand III in 1823 and Leopold II in 1829 also visited the synagogue. These occasions are remembered with commemorative plaques. The synagogue closed permanently in 1956, and the 18th-century ark was sent to Israel where it is now in the Carmiel synagogue. During the 1990s restoration, the few parts of the original building still standing were left in brick while the rest of the reconstructed synagogue is covered with white plaster. All the furnishings are new but designed to recall the originals.

When Italy was unified in 1861, the ghetto of Pitigliano was abolished (the Rome's ghetto would not fall until 1870). Quickly, given their new freedom. many of the Jews of Pitigliano moved on to larger cities, where like many newly emancipated Jews in Italy, they rapidly entered new business ventures and within a generation established themselves in many middle-class professions.

Pitigliano, Italy. Looking out the synagogue gate. Photo: Samuel Gruber 2025.

In 1938 at the time of the fascist racial laws, about 70 Jews lived in Pitigliano. This number quickly decreased as individuals and families left seeking safety during World War II leaving about 30 Jews in the town. Life was hard between 1938 and 1943, but not life-threatening until the Italian surrender in 1943, when Germany instituted direct oppression of Italian Jews. Most of Pitigliano's Jews survived the war aided by Catholic families who hid and protected them throughout the territory. Commemorative plaques by the synagogue list the names of Italian Jewish Holocaust victims with connections to Pitigliano, and the International Raoul Wallenberg Foundation has also named Pitigliano and surrounding villages a “A House ofLife,” in honor of the role of its citizens in protecting Jews under fascism and the German occupation.

The synagogue was the most visible reminder of the Jewish community until its collapse in the landslide which carried most of the building along with archives and treasured objects down the precipitous slope into the gorge below. For decades, only the imposing gate from the street remained visible, behind which was a void.  

Pitigliano, Italy. Synagogue entrance. Photo: Samuel Gruber 2025.

Pitigliano, Italy. Holocaust memorials at synagogue entrance. Photo: Samuel Gruber 2025.

 

 The synagogue was rededicated in 1995 (My sister Ruth was there at the dedication). During these years Pitigliano began to promote its Jewish history which despite the decline and disappearance of the Jewish community, was essentially a story of acceptance respect and salvation. In Pitigliano because of the bravery and generosity of Christian neighbors, it was possible to celebrate the rich cultural heritage of Italy’s Jews without having to delve too deeply into the concurrent history of Catholic anti-Semitism and the horrors of the Holocaust.