This magical city was once home to a vibrant Jewish community. Its ancient synagogue gloriously restored, it still boasts the sights, sounds and smells of the golden days.

History
Sights
Side Trips Reading
Recommendations

It’s like coming up to Jerusalem from the east, but you’re in the Tuscan hills, not the Judean desert. The bus rounds yet another bend and suddenly you see it glowing against the sky. Pitigliano, also known as La Piccola Gerusalemme, Little Jerusalem, or Lo Scoglio, the Rock, seems sprung like something organic from the long, rough wall of volcanic rock, or tufa, of which all its structures were built. Yet this medieval frieze of a town also seems to float, cloud-like. It’s a vision both earthy and unearthly that does bring Jerusalem to mind, but only from a distance. Strolling along one of the twisting, cobbled streets, it’s hard to imagine yourself anywhere but in Italy, although from time to time you might be reminded of Safed.

Especially when you’re standing in front of the synagogue and realize you’re hearing Hebrew, not Italian. Elena Servi, born here in 1930 and president of the Associazione La Piccola Gerusalemme, learned Hebrew while living in Israel from 1986 to 1995, when she came back here. Today, she is one of the town’s three Jewish residents. She particularly enjoys hosting Israelis and others with whom she can speak Hebrew. But her delight in showing anybody around is always palpable. This temple was the center of her family life before the war. And during the war, local people, some of them strangers, offered shelter (on one occasion, in a tufa grotto) until the war was over.

It is in large part because of Servi that the synagogue, badly damaged by Allied bombs, now stands immaculately restored to its sixteenth-century splendor, says Valfredo Cherubini, who works closely with Servi, taking visitors through the premises or down the winding road to the cemetery (visible, like a gem set in the immense green and blue vista, from the temple’s terrace). “She had the knowledge that was needed,” Cherubini says, “and the memories to make all this possible.” In 2001, Servi was named Woman of the Year for the province of Grossetto. Everyone stops to greet her as she goes about her business in town, stopping at the photo shop, for instance, for newly printed postcards of the synagogue—no task is too small for her or too large. Or too inconvenient. Late one rainy spring day, for instance, she had already locked the temple doors when a good-looking young Italian couple in hiking gear showed up. She shook her head, then said (eyes sparkling), “Do you want me to open it just for a minute?” They smiled hopefully. She not only opened the door but gave them her grand tour, always colorful, full of surprises, such as the fact that the nickname Little Jerusalem derived not only from Pitigliano’s appearance, but from the once-vibrant presence of its Jewish community.

There is something infinitely reassuring about looking out from the synagogue to its cemetery, about their connectedness to each other and to the town. Pitigliano is a place of synthesis right down to its foundations, where the natural melds with the crafted so that even architects have difficulty telling which is which. It is also infinitely adaptable, rooted in age-old agricultural and artisanal traditions, yet now host to an annual international Jewish film festival (www.pitifest.it). Even in a country where the Jewish past is explored and celebrated with a singular passion, Pitigliano is clearly in a class by itself.

History
Pitigliano’s Jewish history was launched by the Catholic Church’s counterreformational campaign to segregate and humiliate the Jews. After Pope Paul IV’s 1555 bull cum nimis absurdum, which demanded, among other restrictions, ghettoization, some Jews fled the papal states to independent duchies where the atmosphere was freer. Pitigliano was particularly attractive because it was not far from Rome and because of the laissez-faire social policies of the Orsini, the aristocratic family in charge of this part of Tuscany. As David de’ Pomis, one of the first Jews to live here, wrote, “Thank heavens I passed into the service of Conte Niccolo Orsini, who for five years allowed me to practice the art of medicine in the three cities of refuge, Pitigliano, Sorano and Sovana.”

The community grew as more Jewish exiles arrived from Florence, and in 1598 the synagogue was built. The Pitiglianese, most of whom made a living farming, appreciated the artisanal abilities of the Jewish newcomers who quickly went into business as carpenters, weavers, shoemakers, tailors, bookbinders and moneylenders. But when Pitigliano joined the Grand Duchy of Tuscany in 1608, the Medici replaced the Orsini and the privileges the Jews had enjoyed were rescinded. They no longer could own their own land or, as of 1622 when the ghetto was set up in a small area around the synagogue, live anywhere or practice any trade they pleased. Despite their increasing poverty, they were taxed exorbitantly to fund civic projects.

In the mideighteenth century under the House of Lorraine, living conditions improved. Plaques in the synagogue record visits by various grand dukes, notably Pietro Leopoldo, who was suitably impressed with its “gilded stucco” and “fine design.” But what ended Pitigliano’s ghetto period were events arising out of the French occupation of Tuscany at the end of the century.

The Jews sided with the French for both philosophical and pragmatic reasons; the revolutionary motto “liberté, egalité, fraternité” translated into at least temporary freedom from ghettos in many towns. So when the anti-French fervor of much of the rest of the population erupted, violence was directed at the Jews. Riots in Monte San Savino destroyed its Jewish community. In Siena, the synagogue was burned and 13 Jews were brutally murdered. The Jews of Pitigliano, too, suffered a pogrom. But when a second wave of ruffians showed up from Orvieto and defaced the synagogue, non-Jewish Pitiglianese came to the rescue of the Jewish community, leading to an ongoing rapport between local Catholics and Jews.

The early nineteenth century is remembered as “the golden age” of Little Jerusalem. At its height, between 1850 and 1861, the Jewish population reached 400, about 20 percent of the general population. Businesses flourished; there was a Jewish school, and eventually a library of thousands of books (many in Hebrew) and an institution to care for the poor. Words, expressions, even whole stories from the Jewish tradition, in the Pitiglianese Jewish vernacular (part Hebrew, part local dialect), enhanced Antonio Becherini’s sonnets satirizing local life and customs. Jewish idioms enlivened everyday conversation, too, as the renowned cookbook author and memoirist Edda Servi Machlin, a distant relative of Elena Servi, recalls in The Classic Cuisine of the Italian Jews. For instance, a Christian mother might say to a child who pinched some roast chicken before suppertime, “Why did you do mila on that?” unaware that mila in Hebrew is circumcision.

After the unification of Italy in 1861, Pitiglianese Jews began emigrating to nearby Livorno and other cities, largely for economic reasons. But a core community remained and continued to contribute to local life. When the town’s first electric lights went on in 1898, the local paper credited the Jewish engineer Temistocle Sadun with this “stupendous idea” and its “successful realization” and Becherini wrote a sonnet commemorating the occasion.

And Jewish cuisine vastly enriched indigenous eating habits (as happened in so many other Italian cities and towns). One of the most popular examples of this culinary borrowing are sfratti, honey and nut cookies shaped like the sticks with which officials pounded on doors to inform families that they must move to the ghetto. Sfratto means “eviction” in Italian. Servi Machlin wrote that although the Jews served sfratti on Rosh Hashana “to ward off the possibility of future evictions and as a wish for a good, sweet year, the gentiles made them for weddings to ward off any marital battles.”

By 1938, when the racial laws were enacted, there were only 60 Jews left in Pitigliano and life soon became unbearable for them as it did for Jews throughout Italy. Some left the country; those who remained when the Germans came hid with farming families in the surrounding hills and valleys. After the war, only 30 Jews came back to Pitigliano. The synagogue, damaged when the Allies bombed the Meleta River bridge to stop retreating Germans, was opened only on Yom Kippur. The last Yom Kippur service was on October 12, 1959; the roof was about to cave in.

Throughout the 1960’s and 1970’s it was as if the Jewish presence in Pitigliano had been erased. After the roof of the temple finally did collapse, the rest of the building was demolished. It wasn’t until 1980 that the community, with the help of the Jewish community of Livorno, began the slow but beautifully realized resurrection of the synagogue, completed in 1995. Just last year, the finishing touches were put on the underground rooms, including the kitchen where so many years of holiday baking took place. Little Jerusalem was reborn.

Sights
It is early on a spring morning in Pitigliano. A black cat is out for a stroll; a woman stands on a doorstep flanked by pots of mimosa and plates of pasta for stray cats—there are lots of cats—yelling up to a crony leaning over the geraniums in her windowbox. At La Cantina Incantata, a source of all local delicacies including the superb kosher wines labeled La Piccola Gerusalemme, you can buy sfratti to munch as you stroll past the Medici-era aqueduct to the Piazza della Repubblica. In front of the pharmacy, where even the smallest purchase comes wrapped in paper printed with the town’s silhouette, and not far from the fountain, paid for in the seventeenth century with Jewish tax money, sits a group of old men. They will still be there at noon.

Looming over the piazza with its box-cut linden trees is the Palazzo Orsini, designed in the fifteenth century mainly by Antonio da Sangallo and Baldassare Peruzzi. Definitely not to be missed among the collections filling this massive pile is the jewelry (ropes of garnets and coral, earrings and bracelets of gold so rouged it looks like copper) and the paintings Archangel Michael and Souls in Purgatory by Francesco Zuccarelli, born here in 1702, a contemporary of Canaletto and obviously a big fan of Claude Lorrain. Adjoining the Palazzo is the Museo Civico Archeologico with its Etruscan art and relics.

From either side of the Piazza della Repubblica are sweeping views of land and sky. The far ends of dark alleys branching off the main streets open onto bright stripes and patches of that same spectacular view. You can walk yourself into a sensory trance here, seeing each house, church, fountain, wall, door and gate in miniscule detail, stone on stone, moss on stone, terra cotta, wood weathered almost to crumbling, rusted iron; hearing the sounds of hammering and of Vespas; smelling the hot sweetness from a bakery with a window full of what look like nicely browned doilies. These turn out to be Pitiglianese matzas. You are in front of the Panificio Ghetto, which produces typical local baked goods, not kosher but some of them of Jewish origin. This fragrance of baking matzas, not to mention sfratti and other exotic biscotti, takes you back to the golden years when families preparing for the holidays crowded into the underground room with the forno delle azzime (matza oven).

Just off via Zuccarelli, near today’s bakery, an alleyway called Vicolo Marghera leads to the stairway down into the tufa maze containing the ancient forno. Access to this subterranean world, which also includes a mikve, kosher butcher and the cantina where kosher wine was made, is no longer the dark and dangerous adventure Servi Machlin wrote about.

But more than a trace of the fairy-tale fascination it held for her as a child exists for today’s visitor, especially in the chalky room where the baking took place and where daylight seeps in through windows grated with wrought-iron menoras, with its blackened, empty oven and old photos of the days when aproned cooks stirred up holiday aromas.

Upstairs in the synagogue, the spirit of those days permeates every part of the astonishing restoration—a graceful maze of chandeliers, stucco medallions with inscriptions from the Torah and from secular history, the majestic, gilt-inscribed wooden Ark, a Sefardic-style central pulpit of rich wood, and above it all the lacy wooden wall of the matroneo, or women’s gallery. This is a reconstruction of one of the oldest synagogues in Tuscany, and despite the lack of a local minyan it is not merely a museum. In recent years, a group of German visitors held an atonement service here; there have also been several weddings.

A visit to the Jewish cemetery can be arranged at the synagogue and will take you, via a zigzagging stone stairway near the aqueduct and a serpentine road without a footpath, down into a terraced place of soaring cypress trees and purple roses. One tomb is a lifelike sculpture of a little girl reclining on a fancy carpet, a bow in her hair. The almost illegible inscription says “Alla Cara Adoratissima Carla.” She was the daughter of the engineer Temistocle Sadun.

Side Trips
This part of Tuscany (known as the Maremma) was originally settled by the Etruscans, ergo Tuscan. Evidence of their civilization crops up everywhere among the oak, beech and olive trees and between the vineyards of the verdant countryside, especially around Sorano and Sovana which, like Pitigliano, grew from volcanic rock. These medieval villages comprise the three points of a tufa triangle.

Sorano and Sovana had seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Jewish communities that were microcosms of Pitigliano’s, but no trace of them exists except the Via del Ghetto near the Church of San Nicola in Sorano. Neither town, however, has lost an iota of medieval and Renaissance charisma. And both, in recent years, have gained chic boutiques filled with handmade sweaters, handbags, ceramics and other modern artisanal splendors, along with plenty of delightful coffee bars and trattorias.

One vestige of Sorano Jewish life, however, can be found in Pitigliano. In the seventeenth century, the rabbina (rabbi’s wife) commissioned a large, terra-cotta wine jug. To buy a smaller version of the rabbina (as the jug became known), go to Roberto Polidori’s ceramics shop at 152 via Roma in Pitigliano.

Reading
Anyone planning to visit Pitigliano, whether in reality or fantasy, must read The Classic Cuisine of the Italian Jews: Traditional Recipes and Menus and a Memoir of a Vanished Way of Life by Edda Servi Machlin, who was born in Pitigliano in 1926. In this book and its sequel, The Classic Cuisine of the Italian Jews II, Servi Machlin has created the literary and culinary counterpart of Pitigliano’s brilliantly restored synagogue. Her words lovingly depict the people of La Piccola Gerusalemme, especially her father, who was the rabbi. Her miraculous recipes bring the flavors and aromas of that close-knit little world right into your kitchen. They include the ultimate roast chicken, the original eggplant parmigiana (one of Jewish Italy’s gifts to the rest of the world), and, yes, sfratti.

If these two books leave you wanting more—and they will—fortunately you can go on to Servi Machlin’s haunting memoir, Child of the Ghetto: Coming of Age in Fascist Italy and finally, The Classic Dolci of the Italian Jews, which will take you on a delicious journey way beyond sfratti. Servi Machlin’s books are published by Giro Press (www.giropress.com).

Recommendations
To visit the synagogue (no telephone), ghetto area and cemetery, it is best to phone ahead. You can reach Signora Elena Servi, president of the Associazione, at 011-39-0564-616006 or cell phone 339-7013020 if you speak Italian or Hebrew. The number for Pitigliano’s city hall is 0564-616322.

There is only one hotel in Pitigliano, the Albergo Guastini in Piazza Petruccioli (0564-616065; fax 0564-616652) and it is very good, as long as you request a room above ground level and especially if you get one with a valley view.

The hotel’s restaurant, like the town’s other restaurants, is nonkosher but offers wonderful vegetable dishes such as tagliatelli with porcini, pici with zucchini and artichokes, Acquacotta soup and Misticanza salad. Near the hotel is La Cantina Incantata, where you can buy fresh produce and other products for do-it-yourself meals. And don’t forget the famous Piccola Gerusalemme wine. The restaurant Il Tufo Allegro, which is near the synagogue and offers classic local Jewish dishes, has become a hot stop on the foodie route.

Pitigliano is located along the SS74 road that runs east-west from Albinia to Orvieto. By far the easiest way to get there is to drive. Take the A1 (Autostrade del Sole) either south from Florence or north from Rome and then go west on SS74.

From Rome, you can also take the Aurelia road which follows the coast to Albinia, then go east on SS74. There is also train-bus service to Pitigliano. For schedule information, visit the Ferrovia Italiana (Italian rail; www.trenitalia.com) and RAMA (the bus company; www.griforama.it; 0564-25215).

The train and bus alternative can be arduous (serendipitous connections, many stops in the middle of nowhere), but once you get there, you’ll agree that Pitigliano is worth any amount of effort.