Synagogue and Jewish Museum of Florence

This guide to Florence's Great Synagogue centers on August 1944, when retreating German troops packed the building with explosives and someone crept through the dark disarming them one by one. It reaches back further to 1848, when Florence granted its Jewish community civic equality, and to the 1870 bequest of community leader David Levi that paid for the striped Moorish-Revival walls and domes, designed by three architects, one of them Jewish.