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This is the Vico di Untoria, located in the heart of the Jewish ghetto of the “Lanterna” in Genoa. The empty hollow above the sign once contained a crucifix. Untoria in English means, “plague carrier” and it was the name given to the street which ran through the 17th century ghetto making no mistake in identitifying who was responsible for …
Hidden in a private cellar on the rue Benoit Bunico, the former Jewish ghetto in Nice, which may date back to the 15th century, well before the ghetto of Venice, has been found an ancient Menorah carved into a rock placed into the wall. When most people think of a Menorah, they think of what is really something else, a …
This is the Grand Synagogue in Nice. It was built in 1885 and dedicated in 1886. When the Nazis first came to occupy Nice it was September 8, 1943. A quick look at the calendar shows that Yom Kippur in 1943 began on September 9. Knowing that the Jews of Nice would be at the synagogue on their most holy …
The story of Diasporic Jews is a long one. A people whom history has sent into exile from their place of origin. They ended up on unfamiliar ground and adapted their lives. They spoke their host’s language, wear his clothes, adapted his food and use his architectural vocabulary to build their houses and their synagogues, yet all the while they …
At Via Nissa, we concentrate the bulk of our non-research efforts on what we might call small-scale specialty tourism or niche heritage and cultural tourism. Our focus on minority groups, such as Jewish history which has become our most frequently requested visit lately, such to the point that we are expanding to Jewish Marseille and eventually into the Jewish Piedmont …
Founded by Greek colonists from Phocaea around 600 BC, Marseille (ancient Massalia) has a long history of Jewish presence dating back 1,000 years. Today, France’s second largest city is home to about 80,000 Jews, or almost 10% of its population. This represents one of the largest Jewish populations on the shores of the Mediterranean Sea, outside of Israel, with Marseille …
It was called “Lou Camin dei Anglès”. In 1822, reverend Lewis Way, put a group together to raise money to level the land, at the edge of the Paillon River where the Casino Ruhl and Meyerbeer street are today and built a place to stroll by the sea. Twenty years later, a culvert or pipe on the mouth of the …
What’s wrong with Apollo in the “Fontaine du Soleil” by the sculptor Alfred Auguste Janniot (1889-1969)? In legend, the ancient Greek deity Apollo, the son of Zeus, master of Olympus, rode a chariot pulled by fiery horses across the sky every day to bring light to the world. Venerated in various guises and incarnations throughout classical antiquity, radiant Apollo came …
Have you ever noticed the glass covering just at the tramway entrance Opéra? What could it possible show as the glass has become so dirty, nobody can tell. Well, it is the vestige of the former Pont Vieux, written about as early as the year 1250. The bridge was built from stone. The Paillon River has disappeared from our view, …
While working in the archives of the Alpes-Maritimes in Nice, sorting documents from a 20th century politician, I ran across a letter from a constituent which gripped my attention like no other. The letter was one of palpitating fear. You could almost feel the sweat dripping with each word as the writer, processing the horror of his circumstances, tried to …
