Cimitero ebraico di Pitigliano

On a terraced slope under cypress shade, below the road that rings Pitigliano, lies the burial ground of a community that once filled a quarter of the town. Founded in the mid-sixteenth century at the request of a court physician, the Jewish cemetery keeps simple early stones beside exuberant nineteenth-century marble — a quiet counterpart to the synagogue and ghetto above.

Why it matters

Pitigliano's Jewish history is usually told through the synagogue and the lanes of the ghetto, but a community is also measured by where it buried its dead. Granted in 1556, the cemetery is among the earliest tangible evidence of Jewish life in Pitigliano. It remained in use through the Orsini and Medici periods, emancipation, migration and the Second World War. Its terraces include simple early stones and monumental nineteenth-century marble tombs.

What to notice

The cemetery occupies a hillside among old cypress trees. The earliest graves are low, simple stones; nineteenth-century sections contain sculptural marble monuments. The municipal portal describes a recumbent figure of a young girl resting on a marble carpet and an angel with outspread wings, funerary sculpture that contrasts with the restraint of older stones. The cemetery lies below the Christian cemetery beside the provincial road, a location that reflects the Jewish community's historical position within and beyond the town.

Context and history

The Musei di Maremma network dates the founding grant to 1556, when Count Niccolò IV Orsini — favourable to the Jews in his territory — assigned land to David de Pomis, his personal physician, for a burial ground; the municipal portal preserves the tradition that de Pomis sought it for a companion who had died prematurely. The context explains the date: after the 1555 papal bull, Pitigliano became a first refuge for Jews leaving the Papal State. The Medici, who took over the county in 1608, established the ghetto in 1622. Through the nineteenth century the community grew to roughly a fifth or a quarter of the town, earning the nickname La Piccola Gerusalemme from the Jews of Livorno. After emancipation in 1861 many left for Livorno, Rome and Florence; about seventy remained in 1938, and during the war some thirty were hidden and saved by Catholic farming families nearby.