Sinagoga di Cuneo

Up one staircase in a plain house on Contrada Mondovì waits one of the ghetto synagogues that survive almost intact in Piedmont. Frescoed walls, a painted illusionistic dome and a Baroque ark from 1783 stand in the rooms where Cuneo's Jews have worshipped for centuries — a rare interior, kept by the Jewish Community of Turin.

Why it matters

The synagogue preserves a ghetto-era interior with much of its furnishing intact. It remains in the building where the community worshipped. Its sanctuary on the second floor preserves the full decorative programme of a ghetto synagogue as reworked after Emancipation, and the building around it still holds the community schoolroom and the Davide Cavaglion study library dedicated to the Jews of Piedmont. For anyone tracing Jewish history in Italy, it documents both the constraints of ghetto life and the confidence that followed legal equality in 1848.

What to notice

The sanctuary is upstairs, hidden in the tradition of ghetto places of worship. Look first at the walls, painted with elegant frescoes in mirrored panels, and then at the ceiling, where a trompe-l'œil dome conjures a spatial grandeur the modest room does not actually possess. The wooden aron of 1783 is the artistic centrepiece: its Baroque doors carry a large central menorah flanked by implements of the Temple sacrifice. The seating plan reflects the post-Emancipation reordering, in three parallel rows facing the tevah and the aron, which stand together on a single raised platform behind a light-wood balustrade — an arrangement borrowed from church practice. Beneath the hanging pulpit a cannonball is immured in the wall, and in the courtyard the old oven for baking Passover matzah survives.

Context and history

Jewish residence in Cuneo is documented from around 1406, when moneylenders were permitted to settle; after 1570 they were joined by families fleeing the papal territories of the Comtat Venaissin. Under the Statuta Sabaudiae of 1436 Jews were confined to a single quarter of the city along Contrada Mondovì, and in 1724 the ghetto was formalised between via Mondovì and via Chiusa Pesio. A rule against outwardly visible places of worship explains why the synagogue sits hidden on an upper floor of an ordinary house. The community shared the city's hardships through Cuneo's repeated sieges; during the Austro-Russian siege of 1799 a cannonball struck the synagogue but failed to explode, and the community commemorated the deliverance with an annual celebration known as the Purim della bomba. Full emancipation arrived in 1848, and in 1884 the sanctuary was radically renovated: a new representative facade was finally added, bearing a frieze with the verse from Exodus promising that a sanctuary will be built so that God may dwell among the people. Twentieth-century migration to the cities thinned the community, and its heritage passed to the care of the Jewish Community of Turin.