Vittoria Street

Card: Place - Type: Streets and squares

Via Vittoria (già via Gattamarcia). Fotografia di Federica Pezzoli, 2015. © MuseoFerrara

Indeed, Via Gattamarcia is included in the ghetto area along with Via Mazzini and Via Vignatagliata.

Lat: 44.833773 Long: 11.620416

Build: XV Sec. (1400-1499)

News from: 1624 - 1627
Istituzione del Ghetto

News from: 1848
Abbattimento dei cancelli del Ghetto

Variation: 07 February 1860
Cambio di denominazione da via Gattamarcia a via della Vittoria

1. History

Together with Via Vignatagliata, Via Vittoria is part of the most residential area of the ghetto, with small buildings, inner courtyards, and charming balconies. At the intersection with Via Ragno, gates were closed marking the division from the rest of the city.

At the current address 39, there was the nursing home for the elderly named after Allegrina Cavalieri Sanguinetti, well-known within the Jewish community for its model management. Just inside the entrance gate, you can still read the plaques commemorating the donations made by families and individual benefactors.

At number 41, the synagogue of the Spanish rite or Scola Spagnola was located, destroyed by Nazi-fascists in 1944, whose furnishings are mostly found today in the Lampronti oratory in Livorno.

2. Quotes

"This street had the disgraceful name of 'via Gattamarcia' due to the ugly habit that the inhabitants had of throwing dead animals, especially cats, onto the street and letting their carcasses rot! [...] I believe that the name 'via della Vittoria,' given to this ancient street, derives from the double victory, or moral triumph, achieved by the children of Judah (who always populated this area of the ghetto) over the Theocratic Government, when on February 28, 1831, they were admitted to enjoy the rights of free citizens; and when on March 21, 1848, the people tore down the gates that closed the exits of the ghetto streets, and ignominiously forced the Jews to live separated from the Christian community. The name 'Vittoria' was decided for via Gattamarcia on February 7, 1860, by the City Council." (Melchiorri, pp. 163-164)

3. In literature

Via Vittoria is one of the streets in Ferrara’s old town that punctuates Giorgio Bassani's The Novel of Ferrara, portrayed often as a world unto itself.

‘”the Via Vittoria bunch...” This phrase usually referred to the members of four or five families who had the right to attend the small, separate Levantine synagogue, also known as the ‘Fanese’, situated on the third floor of an old Via Vittoria house, and so to the family of Da Fano of Via Scienze, to the Cohens of Via Giuoco del Pallone, to the Levis of Piazza Ariostea, to the Levi-Minzis of Viale Cavour, and to who knows which other isolated family group: all of them anyway people who were slightly odd, types always a shade ambiguous and evasive, whose religion, which in the Italian School had taken a more working-class and theatrical, almost Catholic turn, that was clearly reflected even in the character of the people themselves, largely extrovert and optimistic, typical of the Po valley, had in their case remained essentially a cult to be practised by the few, in semi-secret oratories at which it was opportune to arrive by night, in small numbers, slinking down the darkest and least known alleys of the Ghetto.’

(G. Bassani, The Garden of the Finzi-Continis’, in The Novel of Ferrara, translated by Jamie McKendrick, Penguin Classics, 2018, e-book location 4321)