Echoes From the Roman Ghetto

The Portico d’Ottavia is one of those chunks of urban surrealism that you come across only in Rome. From a cavity about 20 feet below street level, the ruin of a massive 2,000-year-old portico thrusts its crumbling marble geometry into the present. The dome of a Baroque church, Santa Maria in Campitelli, peers down from the next piazza like a nosy matron.

A few steps from the ruins, multilingual waiters reel in tourists to dine on their terraces amid pyramids of artichokes. A poster on a palace wall hawks kosher sushi — coming soon! Bearded men in skullcaps jostle students in tank tops.

No one seems the least bit thrown by this jarring mosaic of times and cultures. Everybody is too busy talking, sipping, pointing, sauntering, forking up something delicious.

For half a millennium, the Portico d’Ottavia has been the heart of Rome’s Jewish ghetto, four cramped blocks wedged between the Tiber, the Turtle Fountain, the Theater of Marcellus and the Palazzo Cenci. Amid today’s celebration of earthly pleasures, I had trouble finding the small wall plaque that commemorates “la spietata caccia agli ebrei” — the merciless hunting down of the Jews — that took place here on Oct. 16, 1943.

Seventy years ago, the world was at war, Rome was occupied by the Nazis, and the ghetto was a virtual prison for a large part of the city’s Jewish community. On the morning of Oct. 16, 1943, SS Captain Theodor Dannecker ordered that the prison be emptied.

http://travel.nytimes.com/2013/07/14/travel/echoes-from-the-roman-ghetto.html?hp