Many tourists fall in love with Trastevere and buy a house there.
In fact nowadays tourists seem to outnumber the natives.
Backstreets still evocative of Belli’s and Trilussa’ s bitter-sweet poetry.
A small, cosy world which still has that romantic atmosphere that people coming from far-away lands or cities seem to love at once.
The old Roman (Jewish) Ghetto is somehow a world apart.
You will sense it as soon as you get there.
Walking and listening to the Romans on their way to work or doing their shopping will give you a subtle pleasure.
The Synagogue, the Church of Santa Maria in Campitelli and the old palaces will simply delight you and at the end of the long walk if you feel hungry, don’t worry you can always stop at Gigetto’s and have your lunch there.
Be assured you will have a warm reception and good service .
Felicità (Happiness from Acqua e vino, 1944, Trilussa)C’è un’ape che se posasu un bottone de rosa:lo succhia e se ne va…Tutto sommato, la felicitàè una piccola cosa.
Why Rome had a ghetto? From Wikipedia:Papal bull Cum nimis absurdum, promulgated by Pope Paul IV in 1555 segregated the Jews, who had lived freely in Rome since Antiquity, in a walled quarter with three gates that were locked at night, and subjected them to various restrictions on their personal freedoms such as limits to allowed professions and compulsory Catholic sermons on the Jewish shabbat although to a lesser degree than in other European countries.
This “ghetto” had two objectives— to protect Christians from too close an association with persons of a different religion, and to protect the Jews from mobs or hooligans.
The ghetto was welcome to some Jews because it protected the small community from the drain which must follow from assimilation to the majority and enabled special religious customs to be observed without interference.
For three or four decades of the nineteenth century this was not a black mark to the papal government—Vienna, Prague, Venice—and further East, in Russia and Poland, their treatment could be rougher.
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