Discover Venetian Ghetto

The ghetto's buildings are the tallest in Venice, and the reason is the enclosure itself. A community confined to a fixed island that could not expand outward had to expand upward, so floors were added onto existing houses again and again -- producing blocks of six and seven storeys where the rest of the city rarely exceeds four.

Those added floors have unusually low ceilings, and the windows are small and irregular, because each layer was inserted into a height that was never designed for it. From the Campo di Ghetto Nuovo the effect is immediately legible: the square is ringed by facades noticeably taller and plainer than anything in the surrounding sestiere.

The five synagogues -- the scole -- are invisible from outside, and deliberately so. Venetian law barred them from looking like places of worship, so each was built into the upper floor of an ordinary building, identifiable only by a slightly larger run of five windows marking the prayer hall. The interiors are the opposite: gilded, panelled, with elliptical women's galleries and bimah and ark set at opposite ends of the room.

The two original gates that sealed the island at night are gone, burned in 1797, but the openings they closed are still visible where the bridges land on the campo.