Sinagoga di Reggio Emilia

Reggio Emilia's synagogue stands on Via dell'Aquila in the former ghetto. Rebuilt to designs by local architect Pietro Marchelli and inaugurated in 1858, it remains the principal architectural witness to the city's Jewish history and its changing status across the centuries.

Why it matters

A Jewish community is documented in Reggio Emilia from the early fifteenth century. In 1669, Duchess Laura Martinozzi ordered the community to live within a defined group of streets, where about 885 people were required to wear a distinguishing red ribbon outdoors. The synagogue became the community's religious centre within the ghetto and preserves the memory of both communal life and exclusion.

What to notice

The synagogue developed through successive rebuilding. A wooden Aron, carved by Agostino Canciani in 1755 for the Torah scrolls, is now preserved in Haifa. Marchelli's nineteenth-century reconstruction was publicly inaugurated on 15 January 1858. A plaque on the façade commemorates ten Reggio Jews deported to Auschwitz in 1943. The restored dome follows Marchelli's design after its collapse in the 1950s.

Context and history

A synagogue stood on this site from 1672, after the earlier prayer room near San Giovannino was suppressed. Napoleon's troops removed the ghetto gates, and the Este later reinstated the enclosure. The ghetto was abolished in 1859, following annexation to the Kingdom of Sardinia. Bomb damage in 1944 ended the building's religious use; it later housed a printing works. Restoration in the late 1990s culminated in the dome's reconstruction in 2003. The synagogue now forms part of Reggio Emilia's record of Jewish heritage and the community's history.