A visit to Pesaro Jewish Cemetery on European Day of Jewish Culture

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Although I’ve been several times to the beautiful Sephardic synagogue in Pesaro, today I paid my first visit to the Jewish cemetery on San Bartolo hill. The cemetery, located in the San Bartolo natural park and oriented towards Jerusalem, hosts about 150 funeral monuments over a surface of 6.700 sq.m ca.

We parked our car along the Panoramica road and, after a five minute walk, we arrived in front of a gate in the heart of a wood, mostly laurel oaks and moss. A beautiful, peaceful and enchanted place to be, especially in that time of the year when Summer gives way to Fall, when days are getting shorter and leaves no longer display their different shades of green, as they tend to yellow before yielding definitevely to red in the month of October.

The cemetery dates back to the  end of the 17th century, even if the first Jews arrived in Pesaro in the 13th century (their presence in town is documented from the half of the 15th century). What hit me most upon entering the graveyard this morning was that funeral monuments, mostly vertical or cylindrical, seemed to be perfectly assimilated by the surrounding natural landscape, both in color (monuments are mostly made of local stone or marble) and in shape. Some monuments do not stand straight – like trees bend with the passing of time – and some of them are almost completely covered by branches or bushes. The biblical warning: ‘remember that thou are dust and unto dust thou shalt return’ sounds sweet here, facing the sea and embraced by nature.

I took the following pictures in the Jewish Ghetto last Januray and I use this occasion to post them again.