Free To Enjoy

“Can you just stop reading the signs?” Ailyn asked crying.

“We’re almost done, Sweetie,” I said. “But no, we need to look at the signs. It’s important, even though it’s really sad.”

You could be forgiven for passing through the pleasant neighborhood that was the Rome Ghetto and never realizing the hell that it once was. Pleasant and clean, with some streets blocked off from traffic and built seamlessly into ancient Roman ruins including the Theatro Marcellus and Portico d’Ottavia, the neighborhood has a pleasant, calm energy. The beautiful cafes, bakeries and restaurants serve largely Roman cuisine – only their names like Baghetto (which has both dairy and meat locations) and La Taverna del Ghetto betraying their heritage. Even the Great Synagogue of Rome towering over the neighborhood is clean, white and uses classical Roman elements such that unless you noticed the lack of cross on the roof, you would have to look fairly closely to realize it is a synagogue. It could almost as easily be a church.

Compared to Venice’s ghettos  – which because of the nature of the city’s canals creating separated square areas, making it easy to imagine locking off the area and being trapped within a limited space – Rome’s ghetto has few remnants of its past. Hence the signs that tortured Ailyn.

Placed discreetly around the neighborhood are various plaques in only Italian – the kind of plaques that in America might say something like “Thomas Jefferson resided here while participating in the Continental Congress” or “Warren G Harding spent his final days in this hotel room from July 29 to August 2, 1923” or “Angela Lansbury stayed here while filming her final episode of Murder She Wrote on March 17, 1996”.

In fact, I almost ignored them, the plaques were so innocuous looking. If you stopped and translated every plaque you come across in Rome, you could spend the rest of your life just trying to get across town. But one was on the corner of the gates of the synagogue – which seemed like to have some kind of historical information like when the building was renovated, or dedicated or received a visit from an Israeli Prime Minister or the Queen of England (that was the case at the last operating synagogue in Cochin, India – her late majesty and Princess Margaret really liked the floor tiles).

So, I opened up Google Lens – which instantly translates written material within a photo  – to read, “After prayer in front of this temple, two-year-old Stefano Tache Gay was killed and 40 Jews were wounded by murderous hands due to anti-semitic hatred on October 9, 1982, Shemini Atzeret 5743.

Stealth gut punch.

Another plaque on a pretty, white building across the street from the synagogue  – which I again assumed must be something telling about what the building was or when it was dedicated – instead said, “In perpetual remembrance of the 112 students from these schools suppressed in the Nazi death camps. May their memory be blessed.”

These were not signs designed to tell the story of a neighborhood. These were signs designed to tell the story of a people.

After exploring the businesses – particularly the cafes and bakeries in which Sennen was determined to find blintzes because a restored Jewish community MUST have cheese blintzes (there were none) – and sharing a piece of disappointing apple streudel – I looked at one more plaque sitting just across the street from the Portico d’Ottavia. That’s when Ailyn begged me not to because she had finally turned off her tears. I felt compelled because as I explained to the kids who were hesitant to even go to the Ghetto given their feelings from Venice, we are the ones lucky enough to be here. One quarter of Sennen and Ailyn’s genetics come from people who survived what those 112 students did not. I am fortunate that 100 percent of mine came from people who got out of Europe in the early years twentieth-century, when Ellis Island was wide open. We have a responsibility to look – because we’re here.

“Settimio Calo left this house where he lived with his wife Cleia Frascati and their nine children. When he returned, he found it empty forever. His loved ones had been rounded up on October 16, 1943 and then deported to Auschwitz together with over a thousand Jews in the name of racist policy. None of their family members returned from Nazi Facism. They represent all the families all the families destroyed by anti-semitic hatred. 2010”

What’s almost as sad is that by the time the Nazis arrived on the scene, there were only a few more than 1200 Jews still living in Rome. Italy had not been good to them for a long time. Of those rounded up, like Settimo’s family, 1,022 were sent to Auschwitz and of all 1200+, only 16 survived.

Italy’s relationship with its Jewish population wasn’t great. In 1492, Pope Alexander VI – also known as Rodrigo de Borgia who some may know from the very enjoyable Showtime series The Borgias with Jeremy Irons – welcomed the Sephardic Jew fleeing the Spanish Inquisition and gave them freedom of worship as they settled in Rome. Several of his successors were also kind to the Jewish population as well as the rulers of Naples, Tuscany and Ferrara.

The tides turned in the 16th Century as cities throughout Italy began to lock their Jews in ghettos with many leaving for elsewhere in Europe. In 1555, Pope Paul IV not only decreed a locked ghetto for Rome’s Jews, but enslaved them – requiring them to labor for uncompensated on the restoration of Rome’s walls and to wear yellow star badges. From seven synagogues around the city diversified by background such as Ashkenazis from Germany and French Jews from Provence, Jews were limited to one – located in the ghetto where they were now all forced to live.

Within the next hundred years, Jews were expelled from the Papal States and several other parts of what is now Italy. In the Italian city-states in which Jews remained, their populations were rarely more than 2,000.

And this is the way it went until Napoleon arrived when for roughly 15 years, Jews lived emancipated. However, with the exception of Piedmont-Sardinia in 1848, Jews went again without rights and locked in ghettos throughout most of Italy until the Italian Unification in 1861 and for Roman Jews until 1870 when the Papal States were finally annexed and modern Italy was more-or-less complete.

It’s no wonder there are no blintzes.

With Ailyn anxious to leave the ghetto – as if the walls might reappear at any moment – we walked along the Tiber, passing scores of well-preserved ancient Roman structures including the Temple of Hercules Victor, The Mouth of Truth and The Fortress of the Savelli Family. A twenty-minute walk and a left turn away from the Tiber also took us away from Rome as we had yet experienced it. Rome’s largest outdoor-indoor market (it used to be solely outdoor, but now it has a well-designed structure with stalls similar to the Los Angeles Farmers Market) is in the decidedly working-class neighborhood of Testaccio. The buildings felt less European and had more cracked paint and graffiti. There was newer, blockier housing given some Roman-style facade on our side of the river and across it were buildings likely from the 60’s and 70’s that didn’t look like they belonged at all in Rome.

But the streets were tree-lined, quiet and residential. The area didn’t feel dangerous – just less moneyed. Four blocks away from the river and we ran smack into the pretty and pleasant market. In the mornings, the Mercado Testacchio is focused on its many produce, butcher and fish market stalls. Looking at the ones that remained open at roughly 12:30 when we arrived, the quality was superb. Perhaps the best looking artichokes I have ever seen.

Towards mid-day, the market becomes a foodie paradise with stalls of gourmet cooked foods with everything from creative, gourmet renditions of classic street snacks to five-star pasta dishes at two-star prices. When the kids picked the pasta stall they wanted, the man taking my order somehow talked me into ordering them each a “lamb stick” which I thought was an add-on like a couple of meatballs. Instead, in addition to their Genovese pastas, the kids got packets of maybe a dozen skewers of fresh-grilled lamb – think lamb satay. With bottles of sparkling water included in their meal package, the kids got gourmet meals at bargain-basement prices.  My truffle, spinach-ricotta stuffed ravioli cacio e pepe ravioli wasn’t bad either.

After lunch, we walked the market where Ailyn rejoiced in some beautiful strawberries and Sennen found incredible looking tiramisu for their dessert. Then we walked the Testacchio which had no great museums or works of art, but parks surrounded by the walls of a Roman fortress and neighborhoods with children at playgrounds and parents pushing strollers. It was quiet, unassuming – and while not extraordinary in one sense, very refreshing in another. In other parts of Rome, I have said things like “Can you imagine living in that apartment up there, above all of this?” In the Testacchio – other than living in a place that sounds like a flavor of gelato – life feels relatable.

Having had a good cry, a good meal and the experience of one of the less-trodden districts of Rome, we made our way home on foot – crossing the Tiber and finding ourselves right back in the Travestere – just a few blocks south of Giselda – our ever-faithful beacon. And there, we bought a cheap, extra large suitcase so we can haul back all of our gains from the trip.

“I don’t want to eat Italian food tonight. Can we find something else? I saw a sushi restaurant. Maybe that?” Sennen said. A remarkable statement from a boy who LOVES Italian food.

Food-wise, Italy has somehow mirrored my experience in India. When Emily and I reached Mumbai, everything looked amazing – I wanted it all. Only Indian food not from the tropical south is pretty heavy. After a week or less, meals were beginning to feel more like chores. It all smelled amazing. I WANTED to want it. But the idea of another heavy meal made me want to fast in a land where raw veggies and fruits are a rarity – and when they are available, they are a health risk from e-coli and other potential microbes and parasites. That’s why almost everything is cooked.

Italy doesn’t come with the same risks – and you can buy beautiful produce. But restaurants and prepared foods tend to lean starchy and heavy. I often order a salad with restaurant dinners, but it doesn’t quite change the picture. It’s only the nights we eat in that I get what feels like a healthy meal. I really don’t need another bite of pizza and if the kids hadn’t insisted on the pasta stall today at the market, I probably would have chosen something else – not that the other options were that much better.

In short, everything here is delicious but I’ll be happy for a change. Italy is not Thailand or Bali where I could happily eat forever.

Tonight, we’ll go somewhere – though it hasn’t yet been decided. Unfortunately, our tomorrow was just derailed. The Vatican cancelled our tickets and is not taking further visitors until January 4th. This is a huge loss as we were all really looking forward to it. Of course, we aren’t the first Jews to be kicked out of the Vatican.

We still have our New Year’s dinner reservations and our plan to walk up to nearby Janiculum Hill to watch fireworks. We just need to embrace an unexpected free-day in Rome and find either something new to capture our imaginations or something we loved to return to. I have Sennen working with the Lonely Planet to find something he and his sister will find intriguing for the last day of 2025.

We have two days left – which is nothing for the Eternal City. We will make the most of them. Unlike so many Jews before us, we are free to enjoy.