Italy: We long to be there. Red stone buildings and gelato; sun-struck days and soaring basilicas. “A Room With a View.” Katharine Hepburn in “Summertime.” Audrey Hepburn, liberated and love struck in “Roman Holiday.” One of the many fascinations of Giorgio Bassani’s “The Novel of Ferrara,” a compendium of six interlinked novels examining the lives…
The painting hung for over a century in a Florentine palace, framed against a wall covered in red silk. Petite and extraordinarily detailed, the 18th-century work shows full-blown roses and peonies spilling from a vase, surrounded by a tangle of leaves and smaller flowers. The scene suggests opulence, pleasure, ease. But the recent history of…
ROME (JTA) – The granddaughter of Italy’s Nazi ally fascist dictator Benito Mussolini unleashed a storm of protest from the Jewish community with a tweeted threat to sue anyone who posted “pictures or phrases” that were “offensive” regarding her grandfather. Alessandra Mussolini, a longtime right-wing politician and currently an Italian member of the European Parliament,…
(JTA) — A Puerto Rican woman who falsified documents to show she was Jewish and explored moving to Israel in order to avoid extradition from Italy to the United States was found guilty of murder by a U.S. court. Aurea Vazquez Rijos was convicted Wednesday of offering millions of dollars to a hitman who killed…
This article originally appeared in the Yiddish Forverts. I, a daughter of Holocaust survivors, was born in Tradate, a small town in Northern Italy located in the Varese region. I spent the first two years of my life at Villa Mayer, a beautiful mansion surrounded by acres of lush orchards and a beautiful flower garden…
(JTA) (JTA) — When Italy’s interior minister recommended creating a “registry” of Roma, his remark was merely the latest addition to a long list of anti-Roma statements by senior European leaders. In March, Janos Lazar, the right-hand man for Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban, said: “Once we let them in, they will take over.” In…
ROME (JTA)— Italy’s Jewish community condemned a call by the country’s hardline interior minister to take a census of Italy’s Roma, or Gypsy, population. The Union of Italian Jewish Communities, or UCEI, said in a statement issued Tuesday that the call by Matteo Salvini to create a “registry” of Roma in Italy recalled the anti-Semitic…
(JTA) — A barbershop in Italy, and Holocaust monuments in the Netherlands and France were targeted in separate incidents deemed anti-Semitic. The perpetrators of the incident involving Gianni Errichiello’s barbershop in a northern suburb of Turin in northern Italy torched a car parked in front of the establishment on Marconi Square. They splashed red paint…
