Jewish Quarter

This guide to Venice's Jewish Quarter traces the nightly ritual that began in 1516, when a bell in Saint Mark's tower signaled guards to lock the gates on the Jews confined within this former cannon foundry, the site that gave the world the word ghetto. You'll hear how the community, squeezed into a few acres, built some of Renaissance Europe's tallest residential buildings, and meet Sara Copia Sullam, a poet who turned her rooms into a literary salon and faced a public accusation of heresy from a former mentor. It follows the quarter through to the arrival of Napoleon's army.