Florence & the Jews  – A Jewish presence in Florence has been documented for a very long time, even before the Medici’s era.

However, the destiny of Tuscan Jews was inevitably to be connected to the favor and the fortune of the Medici family.

In the 1490s, when the intolerant Friar Girolamo Savonarola got the power in Florence, both the Medici and the Jews were exhiled.

When the Medici went back in 1512, the Jews where also readmitted, until the next ban of the Medici in 1527.

In 1537 Cosimo de’Medici reconquered absolute power and reorganized the State. As it happened also in Venice, Cosimo I welcomed the Spanish and Portuguese Jews expelled from the Iberian peninsula in the 1490s both in his capital city of Florence and in the port city of Pisa.

More or less in the same years, many less affluent Jews moved to Florence, following  the final expulsion from Naples in 1540 and the establishment of ghettos of Rome and Ancona in 1555.

Cosimo I started to change is attitude in the late 1560’s and 1570’s as political relations with Spain and the Papal State intensified.

Finally, in 1571,  a ghetto was established in the the most central part of Florence.

Today that area, Piazza della Repubblica, is one of the most elegant and famous places in  Florence, but it was not in those days!

Indeed, the Ghetto was built where the Mercato Vecchio
– a crowded and dirty open air market – in the middle
of which was Florence’s main brothel…

The fact that the area was surrounded by a tall wall that had  kept the brothel isolated from the rest of the city appeared as a perfect location for the establishment of a compulsory Jewish quarter!

The ghetto was consequently surrounded by a market, by the Duomo, by the Baptistery and by Santa Maria Novella Church.

The idea that Jews had to move to a place where prostitutes had previously lived is not unusual and witnesses an association that has often been made in Western Europe.

Cosimo’s son, Ferdinand I, invited Jewish businessmen to settle in the new port of Livorno, where they enjoyed great freedom and where there was no ghetto. The experiment proved to be very successful.

Our Jewish Florence tour will try to summon up the memories of those days, bringing back to life some of the most famous characters.