Rome’s Jewish Museum shows ghetto in 1880s

Interactive exhibit allows visitors to ‘stroll’ through streets as they were before neighborhood’s destruction

By AP 5 December 2014, 3:26 am

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An interactive table shows a reconstruction of the Old Ghetto during its unveiling for the press in Rome's Jewish Museum, December 4, 2014. (photo credit: AP/Alessandra Tarantino)

ROME — Visitors to Rome’s Jewish Museum can now “walk” streets as they were before the ghetto neighborhood’s demolition in the 1880s.

Tucked behind Rome’s main synagogue, the museum on Thursday evening unveiled an interactive table that enables people, with hand movements, to simulate strolling the Old Ghetto.

Researchers studied watercolor landscapes from the times, city property records as well as photographs taken before the district was demolished during Rome’s makeover to be modern Italy’s capital.

The neighborhood is home to one of the world’s longest continuously-inhabited Jewish communities. Sixteenth-century Pope Paul IV ordered Jews confined there; papal edicts enforced the Ghetto’s duration until the mid-18th century.

Many streets today look remarkably unchanged, but the interactive table shows how the Tiber lapped up against Ghetto buildings before river embankment construction.