Being tourists 2: Ferrara

On Tuesday of last week we took the train from Bologna to Ferrara, where the new Museum of Italian Judaism was our first stop. It's a work in progress; only a small part of the planned museum has actually been built, and it feels a little temporary. The exhibits (labeled in both Italian and English) lean heavily on videos and graphics, with only a few books, paintings, and other objects, many of them reproductions. 

Nonetheless, the story the museum lays out of the Jews' long history in Italy, beginning well before the Christian era, is well told, a tale of alternating acceptance and persecution. I was interested to learn that the Jewish presence was from the start particularly heavy in the land of my ancestors, southern Italy, which must be why so many southern Italians show traces of Jewish DNA. (I did myself for a while, until the Ancestor.com database got larger and more precise, at which point my Jewishness apparently dropped to a disappointing zero.) 

Several surprisingly interesting videos described the Jewish diaspora in Italy.

There is relatively little about the persecution of the Jews in Italy, and the exhibition doesn't get into the modern era. That made this carving of Little Simon of Trento all the more striking.

Little Simon greets death with saintly aplomb.

In 1475 a toddler named Simonino was found dead in Trento, a town in the mountains to the north. The members of Trento's small Jewish community were accused of murdering him in order to use his blood for their religious rituals--according to some, the first appearance of this notorious "blood libel." The Jews were tortured until they confessed. Then they were burned at the stake.

Simonino's body was put in a crypt in a local church and he was canonized as one of Catholicism's official saints, patron of victims of kidnapping and, grim irony, of torture. Moreover, the town held a procession in his honor every year that included a display of the torture implements the Jews had supposedly used on the child. It was only in 1965, in the era of Vatican II, that Little Simon was de-canonized, his body removed from the church (to where, I wonder), and his annual procession called off.

I suppose it's not entirely fair, but I felt there was something thematic in the fact that on our way to our next stop, the Castello Estense, we ran into a rally by the right-wing Lega party, whose candidate for sindaco of Ferrara was in a run-off scheduled for Sunday, June 10. Some of the signs read, "Prima Gli Italiani"--Italians First.

We were amused that the venue they chose was right in front of a McDonald's. That seemed somehow thematic, too. The multinational version of multiculturalism doesn't seem to bother the folks who like the Lega.

Turning our back on the ugliness of current politics, we headed to the castle, but found ourselves confronting a Middle Ages version of other familiar themes. The vast structure dates back to the 1300s, when a violent rebellion against the city's oligarchs led Nicola d'Este to build a fortress surrounded by a moat and outfitted with a maze of underground dungeons.

The dungeons were part of the tour, and were truly horrifying--dank holes behind heavy iron doors, with only a tiny window to the outside, or none at all. Some enemies of the castle's owners were kept in these places for decades.

This way out.

Having paid for tickets that included a tour of one of the castle towers, Valerie and I felt compelled to actually climb to the top of its 120 or so steps. The nicest thing up there was the orangerie.

We didn't think the vaunted view of the city was all that exciting, however. 

From the top of the tower we could barely see the Lega rally (it's at the far end of the big street in the photo), but we could hear it loud and clear. Although the crowd wasn't all that large, it turned out that Salvini himself, the attention-loving co-premier and right-wing poster boy, had arrived in support of the Lega's local candidate. I hoped that with McDonald's so conveniently nearby someone would milkshake him, but no one did.

Worse, we learned today that the Lega candidate won the run-off on Sunday, ending 70 years of local center-left Partito Democratico rule. "Italians First" apparently spoke to the Ferraresi in a way it hadn't in dear old Fidenza.  

Late that afternoon, when we got back to our Bologna apartment. our feet were sore and that four-floor climb felt more than a little onerous. But we rested up, had some wine and pasta, and the next day were ready to head to Faenza.

(To be continued.)