In Search of the Garden of the Finzi-Continis, Finding the Courtyard

Sephardic Horizons Vol. 1 No.2 (Winter 2011)
In Search of the Garden of the Finzi-Continis, Finding the
Courtyard of the Finzi-Magrinis
By
Judith Roumanii
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 Doña 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 Doña 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
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Anyone who has seen a few Italian films immediately feels transported into the times of Life is
Beautiful or, naturally, Vittorio De Sica’s 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
Bassani’s 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 Sica’s 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 Bassani’s novel rather than De Sica’s 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 town’s 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 town’s favorite son. Bassani’s
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.
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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 Ferrara’s 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 Bassani’s Garden?
The guide directed us down a narrow side street, where we could see the façade only. The
interior has now been converted into modern apartments. There is a moving plaque and
commemoration on the outside, but that is all.
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Plaque on the building that once housed the Sephardic Synagogue, Scola Spagnola
Door of the building of the Sephardic Synagogue
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In Bassani’s 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. Bassani’s
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
Ferrara’s 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 FinziMagrini 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 Bassani’s 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.
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Corso Ercole I
Corso Ercole I
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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
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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 Mussolini’s
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 antiFascism, 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
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survivor’s story, and is an elegy to the once flourishing Jewish community of Ferrara, now a
shadow of its former self.
Ferrara at dusk
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Notes
i
Judith Roumani is the editor of Sephardic Horizons, a member of the planning committee of the Vijitas de Alhad,
and president of the Jewish Institute of Pitigliano. Her field of research and her publications are in modern Sephardic
literature. The photographs are by Jacques Roumani. ii
Giorgio Bassani’s novel was first published in 1962 (Turin, Einaudi, 1962) and has seen many editions. There are
at least two English translations, of which William Weaver’s, with a literary introduction by Tim Parks, is the most
recently published (New York: Knopf, 2005). iii
See Annamarcella Tedeschi Falco, Ferrara: Guide to the Synagogues and Museum (Venice: Marsilio, 2000) for
much detailed information on the synagogues of Ferrara. For more information on the Ferrara Bible, and for
excerpts, see Moshe Lazar, ed., Sefarad in my Heart: A Ladino Reader (Lancaster, CA: Labyrinthos, 1999). For
Doña Gracia, see Andrée Aelion Brooks, The Woman who Defied Kings: The Life and Times of Doña Gracia Nasi
(St. Paul: Paragon House, 2002). iv
An interesting development is the turning of his novel into an opera, commissioned by the Minnesota Opera, and
to be performed in 2012. v
Rita Castaldi and Antonietta Molinari, “Il Ricordo di Bassani,” La Nuova Ferrara Oct 7, 2010, p. 1. vi
“Giorgio Bassani: Il giardino dei libri” Announced in http://www.estense.com/mostra-e-letture-per-il-decennaledi-bassani vii
For tourists wishing to make a tour of “I luoghi di Giorgio Bassani” the tourist board recommends the house
where he was born, the school where he taught, the library where he studied, the family grave, etc. See
http://www.ferraraterraeacqua.it viii
The Nazi archives of Bad Arolsen reveal the fate of Silvio Finzi-Magrini and his family. See Marco Ansaldo, “La
vera storia dei Finzi-Contini,” in the Italian newspaper La Repubblica,
http://ricerca.repubblica.it/repubblica/archivio/repubblica/2008/06/13r2 ix
Silvio Magrini was also a scholar and professor at the University of Bologna. His publications cover the fields of
physics (magnetism), history of science, the history of Ferrara, and Zionism, his works appearing in the first three
decades of the century. There is even a bibliographical reference to his work in the Encyclopedia Judaica. He was
probably one of those Italian Jewish academics who were dismissed from the universities in 1938 when the Fascist
Racial Laws were decreed. x
See the article by Marco Ansaldo, cited above. xi
Afterwards I learned from Guido Fink’s article (cited below) that Bassani was indeed inspired by the gardens of
this villa, the Villa Torlonia, that Mussolini had occupied for about twenty years, and that after the war was left in a
state of neglect for several decades. Its website tells us that in the 1920s Jewish catacombs had been discovered in its
grounds, and Mussolini had turned them into an air raid shelter. xii
Even the name of the city in his earlier stories was simply ‘F.’ until they were published together in 1956 as
Cinque storie ferraresi. See Guido Fink, “Growing up Jewish in Ferrara: The Fiction of Giorgio Bassani, a Personal
Recollection” Judaism (Summer-Fall, 2004), accessed on BNET, http://findarticles.com. Fink however tells us that
Il Giardino caused scandals anyway—from those who felt they were represented in the novel, those who felt they
had been left out, and those who felt they were underrepresented—“some people did recognize themselves in the
characters of the book, or did not and were disappointed, or did recognize themselves but not enough.”
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