Ever since I was a little girl, I have always felt a strong emotion when looking up to admire the cedars of Lebanon painted inside the dome of the Great Synagogue of Rome. Hand in hand with my father Franco, to whom I owe my education and my passion for art, I remained enchanted for hours, gazing out from the terraces of the Janiculum, by the sight of the synagogue’s dome, different from all the others, silhouetted against the panorama of the Eternal City.
Today that I preside over the Foundation for the Jewish Museum of Rome, that enchanted passion has not abandoned me, but has merged with the awareness of the historical and artistic value that this monumental complex represents for Italian culture. Amidst the benches of the Great Synagogue, the marbles of the Spanish Synagogue, the rooms of our museum – another jewel inside the synagogue – and the quaint, narrow streets of the Sant’Angelo neighborhood, testimonies are preserved of Jewish life in the Capital from the time of the earliest settlements in the 2nd century BCE.
The Jewish Museum is a place of rare quality for the decorative arts. In fact, Italian Jewish art is among the most extraordinary in the world: the artists who over time created the precious fabrics and the silver liturgical ornaments of the Sefer Torah were the same ones called by princes and popes, and who made Rome so famous throughout the world.
