How a Walk Through Venice Inspired Me to Write a Novel

By Roberta Rich    |   Wednesday, January 14, 2015- Off the Shelf Venice dazzles. It beguiles. During the day it glitters. At  night it is so quiet, so filled with shadows, you can hear  the  drip of water off the oars of the gondolas, the closing of  the shutters on the palazzi along the Grand Canal, and  the low murmur of voices just around the corner. A city  like no other, Venice is a collection of 130 islands linked  together by bridges, canals, and history, like pearls on a necklace. The city that most tourists see is a city of enchantment. One of these islands served as both a haven and a prison for Jews beginning  in 1516 ¾ the Venetian ghetto. The Ghetto Nuovo is no larger than a few city  blocks.  Walking across the tiny bridge which leads into the ghetto felt like going from, say, the splendour of the Frick Museum on Fifth Avenue to the Lower East  Side. The square is bare except for a lovely marble wellhead in the middle. Surrounded by tall, plain buildings, the equivalent of tenements, the island  seems like a stage set. In 2007 my husband and I went on a walking tour of Venice. Wandering  around the Ghetto Nuovo, an island probably chosen by the city fathers  because it had that rarity in the city, a piazza without a church, I looked up at  he tall, knife-sharp buildings and wondered how people led their day-to-day lives five hundred years ago in such cramped conditions. As more and more  Jews arrived in Venice, first Sephardim from Spain and Portugal and, then Ashkenazim from Germany and Eastern Europe, the apartments expanded  as  more stories were added. Some buildings grew to seven or eight stories  resting on shaky foundations. Existing apartments were carved into small  and smaller rooms. ,... READ FULL POST