In Search of the Garden of the Finzi-Continis,
Finding the Courtyard of the Finzi-Magrinis
By
Judith Roumani[i]
On a recent visit to the city of
Ferrara, we hoped to retrace the steps of the Finzi-Contini family, famous from
the Holocaust-era novel by Giorgio Bassani and its film version.[ii]
With one day at our disposal, we decided to start off by attending the guided
tour of the Jewish community building. It was on a side street just near the
Duomo or cathedral (the ancient ghetto was, as in many places in Europe,
located under the eye of the Church).
Ferrara in Renaissance times was one of the first cities in Italy to
allow Jews to live openly as Jews, under the tolerant dukes of Este. As with
the Medici family in Tuscany, the Estes welcomed Jews, and secret Jews, because
of their ability to finance the rulers vast building ambitions and wars too.
We see the results of their ambition today in the magnificent old buildings
that characterize the center of Ferrara. Ercole I, the Duke of Este, invited
Doa Gracia Nasi to come and reside in Ferrara where, after her many travels
through Europe, most recently to Venice, she was able at last to openly
practice as a Jew and dedicate herself to saving other conversos from the Spanish and Portuguese Inquisitions.
Ferrara was a center attracting Jewish
printers, and the famous Abraham Usque printed there in Hebrew and other
languages for about ten years. He produced the famous Ferrara Bible in Spanish
or Ladino, of which one edition was dedicated to the Duke of Este and one
edition to Doa Gracia.[iii]
The city of Ferrara, as well as being
beautiful, is also today largely calm and quiet (except on the evenings when
drum-playing students invade the Piazza del Duomo): the center is mostly closed
off to vehicles and is full of pedestrians and cyclists—not only students
but also older, well dressed shoppers and bureaucrats wheel by perched on their
bicycles. An almost idyllic scene
of cafes surrounding and leisurely conversations being held in the middle of
the Piazza del Duomo charms the visitor.
View of Ferrara's
main square
Anyone who has seen a few Italian films immediately feels
transported into the times of Life is Beautiful or, naturally, Vittorio De Sicas The Garden of the
Finzi-Continis.
And of course those times were
far from idyllic. The Jewish community of Ferrara is very small today, about
eighty members as opposed to about eight hundred before the Holocaust. Giorgio
Bassanis novel, Il Giardino dei Finzi-Contini, is a sort of memorial to this community, hit hard by the Nazis and
afterward subject to emigration and probably assimilation. It is also a
memorial to the Ferrara the author knew before the war and during the Fascist
period. Bassani himself did not
like De Sicas film version of his novel but probably more people have seen the
film than have read the book. The book is said to be a bestseller and has gone
into many editions and translations
(we discuss here Bassanis novel rather than De Sicas film).[iv]
Bassani consciously tried to write the novel of Ferrara, and it has been said
that the city of Ferrara itself is the main protagonist of all his work. How
then could we discover the Ferrara of the Finzi-Continis, in a brief visit to
an unknown city, more than half a century after Bassani lived there?
It turned out that we might have
some help. Having written the novel of Ferrara Bassani has belatedly become
the author of Ferrara. It is
ironic that Bassani, the Jew who was excluded from university and the towns
tennis club (this may have pained him the most), allowed to be a teacher only
in the private Jewish school, able to publish only under a pseudonym, and
eventually arrested in Ferrara for anti-Fascist activities, is now the towns
favorite son. Bassanis novels were for sale at a book fair in one of the
central squares, the Piazza del Municipio, and there was an article that very
day interviewing Manlio Cancogni, a fellow writer, who reminisces about him, on
the front page of the local newspaper.[v]
An exhibit on Bassani, marking ten years since his death, was to open a few
days later.[vi]
The local tourist board has a recommended Bassani itinerary.[vii]
It seems that Ferrara embraces the memory of the Finzi-Continis even though
they never existed.
The enormous locked doors of the
Jewish community center opened promptly at 12, and we were ushered into the
courtyard, where we saw the remains of a sukkah, small compared with those of
other synagogues (we had just experienced a noisy, crowded and joyous Simcha
Torah in Rome). The building embraced several synagogues, though its external
architecture, as is usual in Italy, revealed nothing of its purpose.
Via
Mazzini, main street of the ghetto
As we mounted a steep flight of
stone steps, and noted how they were worn hollow by the footsteps of many
generations of Ferraras Jews, I had a fleeting vision of Giorgio Bassani and
his characters treading those same steps. Only one synagogue, the Scola
Tedesca, or Ashkenazi synagogue, is in use today. Its windows had long ago been
blocked up on one side, as a synagogue in earlier centuries was not allowed to
overlook Christian homes, but it still had plenty of light and is well kept. We
did not attend on Shabbat and had no idea of how many worshippers there are on
a normal Shabbat. Much of the building is a museum documenting the former
grandeur of Jewish Ferrara. One flight higher, the Italian synagogue, heavily
damaged by the Nazis, has been partially restored for use as a meeting room.
Here the Jews of Ferrara were rounded up before being shipped off to the camp
of Fossoli and eventually to the Nazi death camps. Ancient Holy Arks of the
Torah stand on one side. Visitors can see the very old Ark that has come from
the Sephardic synagogue, or Scola Spagnola, restored in honor of Silvio
Magrini. Where is this synagogue, described meticulously in one of the early
scenes of Bassanis Garden? The guide
directed us down a narrow side street, where we could see the faade only. The
interior has now been converted into modern apartments. There is a moving
plaque and commemoration on the outside, but that is all.
Plaque on the building that once housed the Sephardic Synagogue, Scola Spagnola
Door
of the building of the Sephardic Synagogue
In Bassanis novel, Professor
Ermanno Finzi-Contini, the head of the Finzi-Contini family, has recently
restored this Baroque synagogue.
Thus the few families who identify as Sephardic Jews rather than being
part of the majority, Italian Jewish community, separated and distinguished
themselves by attending this small synagogue and following their own
customs. Bassanis unnamed first
person narrator describes in detail how the small Sephardic community of
Ferrara held services when he was a child in the restored Sephardic synagogue.
The children, partly bored, partly distracted, find a comforting yet
constricting refuge under their fathers prayer shawls during the blessing of
the Cohanim. The tallit, warmly
enclosing, like the walled garden surrounding the mansion of the Finzi-Continis,
is a symbol of the illusory sense of safety of Ferraras Jews before the
Holocaust. Another similar symbol is the elaborate family tomb, somewhat like a
small, ornate pagan temple, in the Jewish cemetery, in which the Finzi-Contini
family had hoped to find its final resting place, and in which only one member
of the family was buried.
Who was the real Silvio Magrini
and why did he go to the trouble of restoring the Ark of a disused synagogue?
For many years Bassani denied that his fictional family was based on any actual
people he knew. Then eventually, a few years before his death, he mentioned the
Finzi-Magrini family.[viii]
They corresponded to his fictional characters in many respects: almost all were
deported to the death camps, except one son, Uberto, who had died prematurely
of the same disease as the character Alberto in the novel. He is the one who in
the novel is laid to rest in the family gravesite. In the corridor of the
synagogue building is a plaque in memory of the engineer Uberto Magrini, who
died prematurely in 1942. This may have been the last plaque put up after the
Fascist devastations on Rosh Hashana of 1941. Another plaque pays tribute to
the noble Silvio Magrini, (1881-1944) who was president of the community and
was deported in 1944, together with almost two hundred other Jews of Ferrara.
The Finzi-Magrini family did constitute a sort of Sephardic and intellectual
aristocracy in Ferrara,[ix]
and seem to have even possessed a large dog similar to the one Bassanis
heroine, Micol, loved. Their daughter, Giuliana, unlike Micol in the novel, was
already married and managed to flee to Switzerland to survive the war, having
three children. Her descendents say that her personality was nothing like that
of the alluring yet unpredictable Micol.[x]
The Finzi-Magrini family did not live on the beautifully proportioned, cobbled
Corso Ercole I, with its walled gardens, but on a parallel street close by, in
a more run-on-of-the-mill, old yet elegant apartment building.
Corso
Ercole I
Corso Ercole I
Great wooden doors greeted us, we half-expected another
plaque though there was of course none, but a kind resident did allow us to
enter. The courtyard was small and prosaic, at least for Ferrara.
Courtyard
of the Finzi-Magrinis
Courtyard
of the Finzi-Magrinis
A
nearby courtyard on the same street
They
lived not on the edge of town but in central Ferrara, removed from the ghetto
but not far away. Giorgio Bassani is said to have found his inspiration for the
novel in a garden, or rather private park, that he visited later in Rome. In
fact, I did visit the garden of Mussolinis villa, in the older suburbs of
Rome, an area of ivy-covered villas and embassies, near the Via Nomentana. The
park (now a public park containing an art museum) has winding gravelly paths,
overgrown thickets, trees of many species, and even an alpine chalet-style
folly. Young bridal couples were posing against dark foliage and as twilight
fell it seemed that it clearly could have served Bassani or a filmmaker like De
Sica on location, as a model.[xi]
After the war, Bassani wished to
respect the memory and protect the privacy of individuals he had known, in the
provincial atmosphere and relatively close-knit Jewish community of Ferrara.[xii]
The human weaknesses he describes in his nineteen-forties Ferrara if anything
endear his Jewish characters to us and underline the utter injustice of the
cataclysm that hit them totally unaware. From our post-Holocaust perspective,
we can see the writing on the wall in every incident, but Jews of longstanding
loyalty to Ferrara and Italy, secure in their places in life and in the city,
felt that taking steps like building their own tennis court, or founding their
own school when Jewish teachers and schoolchildren were excluded from public
schools by the Fascists, were aappropriate and adequate responses to the
Fascist/Nazi threat. Bassani
himself became a teacher in this school. After publishing under a pseudonym,
being imprisoned for his anti-Fascism, then released, Bassani moved first to
Florence, later to Rome, always continuing his anti-Fascist activities. His
novel embodies the regret and bitterness that we find in almost every
survivors story, and is an elegy
to the once flourishing Jewish community of Ferrara, now a shadow of its former
self.
Ferrara
at dusk