The Italian Embassy in Berlin hosted the event \u201cC\u2019era una volta il ghetto\u2026 itinerari musicali ebraici nell\u2019isola della rugiada divina\u201d (Once Upon a Time in the Ghetto… Jewish Musical Itineraries on the Island of Divine Dew) on the occasion of Remembrance Day. The title refers to the Hebrew \u201cI-tal-yah\u201d or \u201cisland of divine dew\u201d, which is what the Jews used to call the Italian peninsula in ancient times.<\/p>\n
During the event, singer, composer, psychoanalyst and ethnomusicologist Miriam Meghnagi, born in Tripoli to a family of Sephardic origin and internationally renowned as one of the greatest interpreters of the Jewish musical tradition, gave a performance. By way of a journey through the songs of Jewish tradition, Meghnagi \u2013 accompanied by pianist and composer Alessandro Gwis \u2013 retraced the centuries-long history of the Jewish community in Italy, offering a musical portrait of cities such as Venice and Rome, where for centuries Jewish communities have lived between integration and confinement \u2013 indeed, the \u201cghetto\u201d, a place created to isolate and to divide, was born in Venice in the 16th century. The performance was also accompanied by an informative talk by Giulio Busi, Full Professor of Jewish Studies and Director of the Institute of Jewish Studies at Freie Universit\u00e4t Berlin.<\/p>\n
In an ideal change of perspective, this journey amid music and words thus transformed the role and perception of ghettos, which, from places of isolation, have now become the beating heart of many cities. Resorting to different languages and musical traditions, a snapshot of the past and present vitality of Jewish culture in Italy was rendered.<\/p>\n
\u201cCelebrating Italian Jewish culture on the occasion of the Day commemorating the extermination perpetrated in the past century is also a way of celebrating the failure of that project, which was put on paper just a few kilometres from this building,\u201d said Ambassador Armando Varricchio in his opening speech. The Ambassador then emphasised the essential contribution made to Italian and German culture by Jewish civilisation: \u201cIt is impossible to think of Italian culture without the contribution that numerous Jewish intellectuals, scientists, artists and economists have made to it over the centuries. The same applies to Germany.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The Italian Embassy in Berlin hosted the event \u201cC\u2019era una volta il ghetto\u2026 itinerari musicali ebraici nell\u2019isola della rugiada divina\u201d (Once Upon a Time in the Ghetto… Jewish Musical Itineraries on the Island of Divine Dew) on the occasion of Remembrance Day. The title refers to the Hebrew \u201cI-tal-yah\u201d or \u201cisland of divine dew\u201d, which […]","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":95517,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[32,9],"class_list":["post-95532","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-retediplomatica","tag-diplomazia-culturale","tag-europa"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.esteri.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/95532","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.esteri.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.esteri.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.esteri.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.esteri.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=95532"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.esteri.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/95532\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":95533,"href":"https:\/\/www.esteri.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/95532\/revisions\/95533"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.esteri.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/95517"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.esteri.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=95532"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.esteri.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=95532"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.esteri.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=95532"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}