Tourism Management
San
Francisco State University, College of
Business, Department of Hospitality and
Tourism Management
HTM 424 – Tourism Management
Assignment – Echoes from the Roman Ghetto
Instructions: You are required to answer the following questions. You should
save your answers in a Word document for submission. Please do not repeat the
questions on your answer sheet. Instead, please list the answers
numerically/sequentially by simply utilizing 1, 2, 3, and 4. Each assignment must
have a cover page listing your name, the name of the assignment, and the date.
The cover page does not count towards the word count. For each assignment, you
are expected to answer the assigned questions in your own words. Each
assignment paper should be at least 250 words. Papers less than the
required 250 words will get zero. This does not mean each question requires a
250-word response; rather, the total number of words for answering the
questions must total more than 250 words.
Assignment – Read the assigned article then answer the questions/prompts
below.
The author discusses his experience traveling to Rome where he retraces the steps
of World War II and the Nazis invasion of the Jewish Ghetto, the portico d”Ottavia.
Reading
1. Echoes From the Roman Ghetto – David Laskin July 14 2013 – NYTimes
Questions/prompts
1. Toward the end of the article, the author describes how gentrification of the
town has lost its sense of history. What role do local officials have in
preserving the historical significance of sights such as the Jewish Ghetto and
the memorial at the Fosse Ardeatine?
2. Is there anything wrong with businesses taking advantage of the “tourist”
climate despite the historical events that took place on the very site? Why or
why not?
Sample Reflection Paper Format/Outline
• The following outline should be used for your reflection paper. You are not
required to use the titles (e.g., Brief Introduction, Body, etc.) but should use
this general format when writing your paper.
• Cover Page
o Title of paper to include the following:
o Reflection Paper Title
o Student Name and ID
o Course Title and Section
o Professor Name and Title
o Due Date of Submission
• Main Paper
o Brief Introduction
§ Introduce the topic to the reader and summarize your
reflection of this topic/article.
o Body
§ Address the following prompts as prescribed in the
assignment. Include 3-4 examples for each prompt
o Conclusion
§ Conclude the reflection paper by summarizing your comments
and main points to the reader.
o References
§ Include any references that were used in your reflection paper
including the main authors. Use APA style.
Plagiarism – Unless noted otherwise, assignments will be submitted through
Turnitin.com. It is strongly encouraged that you provide citations for any
source/reference that is used in your writing. Turnitin.com provides both a “match”
analysis and grammar analysis. Your “match” rating must be under 20% and ideally
under 15%. Points will be deducted for high match ratings, including failure of the
assignment.
Reflection Paper Assignment Title Goes Here
John Q Student
HTM424 – Tourism Management
ID: 123456789
San Francisco State University
Faculty: Dr. Andrew Walls
January 1, 2000
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July 12, 2013
Echoes From the Roman Ghetto
By DAVID LASKIN
Restaurants and cafes serving kosher food line the Via del Portico d’Ottavia in the old Jewish ghetto of
Rome.
The Portico d’Ottavia is one of those chunks of urban surrealism that you come
across only in Rome. From a cavity about 20 feet below street level, the ruin of a
massive 2,000-year-old portico thrusts its crumbling marble geometry into the
present. The dome of a Baroque church, Santa Maria in Campitelli, peers down from
the next piazza like a nosy matron.
A few steps from the ruins, multilingual waiters reel in tourists to dine on their
terraces amid pyramids of artichokes. A poster on a palace wall hawks kosher sushi
— coming soon! Bearded men in
skullcaps jostle students in tank
tops.
No one seems the least bit
thrown by this jarring mosaic of
times and cultures. Everybody is
too busy talking, sipping,
pointing, sauntering, forking up
something delicious. For half a
millennium, the Portico
d’Ottavia has been the heart of Rome’s Jewish ghetto, four cramped blocks wedged
between the Tiber, the Turtle Fountain, the Theater of Marcellus and the Palazzo
Cenci. Amid today’s celebration of earthly pleasures, I had trouble finding the small
wall plaque that commemorates “la spietata caccia agli ebrei” — the merciless
hunting down of the Jews — that took place here on Oct. 16, 1943.
Seventy years ago, the world was at war, Rome was occupied by the Nazis, and
the ghetto was a virtual prison for a large part of the city’s Jewish community. On
the morning of Oct. 16, 1943, SS Captain Theodor Dannecker ordered that the prison
be emptied.
Trucks pulled up on the cobblestoned piazza beside the Portico d’Ottavia, the
neighborhood was sealed, and 365 German soldiers fanned out through the narrow
streets and courtyards. Families hid at the backs of their shuttered shops. The able-
bodied and quick-witted jumped from their windows or fled along the rooftops. The
unlucky were hounded from their homes at gunpoint and herded into the idling
trucks. Of the more than 1,000 Roman Jews seized that day and later transported to
Auschwitz, only 16 survived. On a balmy night in April, I sat pondering that dark
time with my wife and two of our daughters on the terrace of Ba” Ghetto, a lively
restaurant near the Portico d’Ottavia. All around us, waiters were bearing platters of
grilled meat and assuring tourists that their fried artichokes alla giudia were the
best in Rome. Deep into the night, a sparkler ignited atop a slice of cake and
everyone sang “tanti auguri a te” (happy birthday to you) to a 20-something beauty.
Rome’s former Jewish ghetto is made up of four cramped blocks next to the Tiber River.
It was impossible not to be stunned by the contrast between the festive present
and the somber past. Even a dozen years ago, when we first visited the ghetto, the
neighborhood felt forlorn and insular. Old, suspicious eyes sized us up as we made
our way past kosher butchers and shabby tailor shops. Jews had been confined to
these flood-prone riverside streets in 1555 by Pope Paul IV, and in 2001, an aura of
melancholy still lingered.
But today the place is a party. Well-heeled Romans flock to the ghetto to “eat
Jewish” the way New Yorkers pop down to Little Italy or Chinatown. On that soft
spring evening, with Israeli cabernet brimming in our wineglasses and plates
heaped with hummus and couscous, we had trouble summoning up the shadows of
the past. In this city’s 2,000 years of glorious and inglorious history, the nine-month
German occupation (Sept. 11, 1943, to June 4, 1944) is just a nick. But, as I learned
in the course of a week spent chatting with bakers and archivists, museum curators
and rabbis, cabdrivers and historians, the nick remains raw. “Memories of Hitler and
Fascism are still vivid,” Alessandra di Castro, director of the Jewish Museum of
Rome, told me. “The wound still has not healed.”
The deepest wound was inflicted on the ghetto (ex-ghetto, as Ms. di Castro
corrected me with fiercepride), but there are other sites around the city that bear
witness to the struggle and suffering of those months. With a good map, some bus
tickets and a bit of imagination, I was able to tease out this painful, fascinating
chapter of Roman history. From our rented apartment at the foot of the Janiculum
Hill, I trekked out to corners of the city that most tourists, unaware of their
connection to the war, either avoid or hurry through. A 20-minute stroll along the
Tiber brought me to the ex-ghetto, but I had to cross the city on two buses to reach
the Via Tasso, site of a notorious SS prison and now a museum. And from there it
took another 15 minutes by tram to reach the San Lorenzo neighborhood, which
was heavily bombed by the Allies.
The ruins of the Portico d’Ottavia.
It was helpful before setting out to brush up on history. Rome and Berlin, of
course, were allies in World War II — but when the Allies took Sicily in July 1943
and began massing for an invasion of the Italian mainland, the Fascist axis collapsed.
Mussolini was ousted, and the weak new government that took control began
secretly negotiating for an armistice.
The Nazis, however, had no intention of letting Italy go neutral. When an
armistice was announced on Sept. 8, the German army sprang to disarm Italian
soldiers and shore up positions on the Italian mainland. Rome waited and trembled
as the Germans closed in. On Sept. 10, a troop of disbanded Italian soldiers and
civilians made a desperate last stand at Rome’s Porta San Paolo. The battle raged
through the day outside the gate’s crenelated twin towers and beneath the Pyramid
of Cestius, which looms over the Protestant Cemetery, where Keats and Shelley lie.
Some 597 Italian soldiers and civilians, including 27 women, died defending their
city, but by day’s end the Germans prevailed.
I asked the attendants in the little gift shop inside the cemetery if they knew
where the battle had been fought, and one of them directed me to the nearby Parco
della Resistenza dell’8 Settembre. I strolled around the rather unkempt park, past
parents airing babies in the shade of palms and sycamores. But aside from a plaque
commemorating “the soldiers of every corps and citizens of every class who
opposed the German invaders,” I found little trace of the battle. Shadows were
lengthening as I made my way through the Porta San Paolo and waded into the
roaring traffic of the Piazza dei Partigiani (Plaza of the Partisans), a major
transportation hub just outside the city walls. Here I caught a tram to the San
Lorenzo neighborhood, a working-class district about three miles east of the ghetto.
On July 19, 1943,
shortly before the fall of
Mussolini, Allied aircraft
bombed San Lorenzo
hoping to take out a
crucial railway pivot point.
In the course of the
bombardment, some
2,000 to 3,000 Roman
civilians died, and a stray
bomb heavily damaged
the gorgeous Basilica of
San Lorenzo Fuori le
Mura, parts of which date
back to the sixth century. Visitors at the Jewish Museum of Rome.
I wanted to check out what the church and neighborhood look like today. The
tram skirted the hoary arches of the Porta Maggiore and rumbled through the ugly,
gritty but supposedly gentrifying blocks near the vast University of Rome complex.
My stop was next to a modern parking lot that might have been in the Bronx. I was
about to recheck the map when I spotted San Lorenzo’s mellow 12th-century brick
campanile rising against a stand of horse chestnuts. The basilica’s door swung shut
behind me, and the modern world blinked out into the Middle Ages. Photos in the
sacristy show the ruin that remained after an American bomb caved in the roof of
the nave and shattered parts of the mosaic floor, one of the most beautiful in Rome.
Stone by stone, the crimson and white coils and diamonds were lovingly retrieved
and set back into place.
As my guidebook instructed, I descended a short flight of steps at the end of the
nave to find the tomb of St. Lawrence, who was martyred over hot coals in the year
258. But the moment that will stay with me came in the 12th-century cloister. Amid
the dainty paired columns and drifts of myrtle and herbs, I stumbled upon a
fragment of a bomb’s casing that was pried out of the rubble in 1943 — a shard of
American steel displayed incongruously in a sacred Roman garden. In the days that
followed, I asked a number of Italians whether Romans harbored any bitterness
toward the United States over the collateral damage at San Lorenzo: a beloved
basilica in ruins, thousands of citizens killed in a bombing raid gone awry. The
answer was always the same: We are still grateful to America because you liberated
us from the Nazis.
The Via Tasso, about midway between San Lorenzo and the ghetto, is an
undistinguished thoroughfare of 19th- and early-20th-century apartment blocks
and schools, with a crumbling arch at one end and the sanctuary of the Scala Sancta
(the sacred stairs that Jesus trod) at the other. It looks like a comfortable,
convenient place where middle-class Romans and striving immigrants live, though
not a spot you’d go out of your way to visit. But during the nine months of the Nazi
occupation, Via Tasso 145 was the most feared address in Rome. It was here in a
charmless, smudged yellow apartment house that the SS and the Gestapo had their
headquarters, their prison and their torture chambers. During the occupation, the
place was so dreaded that Romans never called it the Via Tasso. Instead they would
say laggiù (downthere), as in, “He was hauled off laggiù.”
If you’ve seen the classic Roberto Rossellini film “Rome, Open City,” you’ll have
some idea of the sinister atmosphere of sadism and despair that infected the Via
Tasso. Former apartments were walled off into tiny cells where political prisoners
and captured partisans lived in the dark with no bed or toilet. The Italian writer
Corrado Augias was an 8-year-old student at a boarding school that backed up on
the Via Tasso. “Even after so many years,” he writes, “I can still clearly remember
the screams that sometimes broke the stillness of the night and penetrated all the
The Basilica of San Lorenzo Fuori le Mura was damaged by Allied bombing in 1943.
way inside our dormitory.”
The former Gestapo headquarters is now the site of the Historical Museum of
the Liberation of Rome, with displays devoted to the brutality of the Nazi occupation
and the response of the Roman people. Artifacts are sparse but heartbreaking: a
sock embroidered with the words “courage my love” that a wife or mother smuggled
in, a tortured prisoner’s bloody shirt, a mournful portrait of Colonel Giuseppe
Cordero di Montezemolo, an officer in the Italian Army who organized the Roman
resistance. The SS interrogated and tortured Montezemolo at Via Tasso for 58 days,
but he uttered not a word. On the museum’s second floor, five prison cells preserve
the incredibly moving messages that prisoners scratched on the walls. “Addio
piccola mia — non serbarmi rancore un bacio,” one prisoner wrote (“Farewell, my
little one, don’t harbor any bitterness on my account, a kiss.”)
The next day, a balmy Sunday, my wife and I decided to get out of town and join
sweater-clad Romans and ski-pole-toting German trekkers for a leisurely saunter on
the Appian Way. Though just a few minutes by bus from central Rome, the road
seems to slumber 2,000 years in the past. The original colossal cobblestones, heaved
and rutted by time, still pave the way. Along the margins, villas peep from behind
hedgerows and grain fields lie open to the sky. Aside from the occasional jet
overhead and the whine of a Vespa, the illusion of classical antiquity was nearly
complete. But the shadow of the war fell here as well. At a crossroads just past the
Catacombs of San Callisto, a sign points the way to the Fosse Ardeatine. We followed
a country lane sunk deep in birdsong and drew up at a gate that resembles a tangled
wrought-iron thorn bush. Beyond a lawn hemmed with flower beds rises a high
stone wall with a black rectangular cavity incised in the bottom. Inside, in the
perpetual twilight of caves and tunnels, is the site of a notorious Nazi massacre. Just
as the Via Tasso meant torture during the German occupation of Rome, so the Fosse
Ardeatine meant slaughter. In retaliation for a partisan bombing on the Via Rasella
(near the Barberini Palace) that killed 33 German soldiers on March 23, 1944, the SS
ordered that 330 Romans — 10 for every German — be put to death. The city
quaked as the Nazis did their culling. Partisans imprisoned at the Via Tasso, political
prisoners from the Regina Coeli prison in Trastevere, former soldiers, Jews, farmers,
students, even a priest ended up in the ranks of the condemned.
For some reason 335 men — five more than the required number — were
transported on March 24 from Rome to the Fosse Ardeatine, a quarry for
pozzuolana (a volcanic ash used to make cement) near the Appian Way. The victims
were shot point blank inside one of the caves. When the last man was dead, the
executioners exploded dynamite to collapse the cave and seal off the bodies.
The memorial at the Fosse Ardeatine is all the more powerful for being perfectly
simple. An opening in the cliff’s side ushers you from daylight to the darkness of the
tunnels. A single light flickers in a chapel. Bronze gates guard the spot where the
corpses, stacked five deep, were discovered after the city was liberated. Inside the
mausoleum 335 identical slabs of granite cover the tombs of the slain. Fabrizio
Genuini, the affable guard at the memorial’s entry, told me as I left: “Many come to
Site of the massacre at Fosse Ardeatine, where 335 Italians were killed by the Nazis.
Rome to see the Colosseum and the catacombs at San Callisto, but relatively few
people aside from school groups come here anymore. Memory is short.”
On June 4, 1944, two and a half months after the massacre, the American Fifth
Army entered Rome from the south and east with little enemy resistance. “My God,
they bombed that, too!” one G.I. marveled when he saw the ruins of the Colosseum.
In fact, the Germans had retreated, “wild-eyed, unshaven, unkempt, on foot, in
stolen cars,” in the words of one witness, without destroying a single building or
bridge. In the end, Rome had little strategic value, and the Nazis were aware that it
would have been a public relations disaster to wreck the Eternal City. Toward the
end of our Roman holiday, I returned to the ex-ghetto to chat, to eavesdrop and to
eat.
But my real motive was to check the pulse of the place 70 years after
incomprehensible suffering. On a bright afternoon, the cafes were crowded; waves
of tourists were sampling kosher fast food and artisanal cheese and biscuits; visitors
from the United States, Israel and Germany were queuing up at the security
checkpoint of the Jewish Museum of Rome beneath the imposing fin de siècle
Tempio Maggiore.
In a few hours, the restaurants lining the Via Portico d’Ottavia would fill, and the
sound of unconstrained voices would echo off the walls, cobblestones and columns.
Yet I couldn’t help hearing an undercurrent of sadness and anxiety. At the unmarked
corner shopfront of the Boccione Jewish bakery, a local landmark for two centuries,
the proprietor, Bianca Sonnino, cut me an extra-large slice of pizza ebraica (Jewish
pizza) — not pizza at all but a dense nutty-fruity coffeecake. Signora Sonnino told
me proudly that Boccione has been her family’s business for generations and that
her mother devised the recipe for torta della ricotta. But when I asked about the
war, she teared up. A gentile woman hid her family, she told me, but close relatives
were among those who were deported to Auschwitz and never returned. “After the
war, the ghetto was nothing,” she said. “It was a dead zone.”
Now some Roman Jews worry that the area is becoming too lively.
Gentrification has jacked up apartment prices beyond the reach of most of the
families who lived here for centuries, indeed millenniums. The narrow lanes around
the Portico d’Ottavia are usually filled with a cosmopolitan collection of well-heeled
bohemians and tourists. A Jewish school recently opened a block from the
synagogue, though most of the children commute from other neighborhoods. The
ex-ghetto is still the beating heart of Jewish Rome, but increasingly Jewish Romans
come here only to pray, to eat, to celebrate and matriculate.
In a few years, the last survivors of the Nazi occupation will be gone and the
events of those terrible nine months will take their place in the flusso di Roma, the
ebb and flow of Rome’s vast tidal history. But for now, amid the joyous clamor of the
ghetto, the voices of those who endured that time can still be heard.
IF YOU GO
On the evening of Oct. 16, to commemorate the anniversary of the roundup of
1943, a torchlight procession will gather in Trastevere and march across the Tiber
to Largo 16 Ottobre in the exghetto.
Where to Eat
Ba” Ghetto, Via del Portico d’Ottavia, 57; (39-06) 6889-2868;
kosherinrome.com. Classic (kosher) Roman Jewish cooking with a zesty
Mediterranean twist, including couscous, hummus and falafel. A kosher dairy
branch is up the street at Via Portico d’Ottavia, 2/A.
La Taverna del Ghetto, Via Del Portico d’Ottavia, 8; (39-06) 6880-9771;
latavernadelghetto.com. Baccalà, fried zucchini flowers, pasta with broccoli and
sausage, meatballs, goulash, grilled tuna. The food here is kosher, hearty and
traditional.
Giardino Romano, Via Portico d’Ottavia, 18; (39-06) 6880-9661;
ilgiardinoromano.it. Roman- Jewish specialties — planked and fried artichokes,
tripe, oxtail, abbacchio (lamb) — served indoors in an attractively restored 16th-
century palace, or outdoors in a quiet back garden or on the festive terrace near the
Portico d’Ottavia. Not kosher, but open on Friday night and Saturday.
Pasticceria “Boccione” Limentani, Via Portico d’Ottavia, 1; (39-06) 687-8637.
You’ll probably have to wait in line and the service may be gruff, but it’s worth it for
the pizza ebraica, the ricotta e visciole (wild cherry) tart and the slice of history.
Museums and Memorials
Explorations of the ghetto should begin at the Jewish Museum of Rome, Via
Catalana; (39-06)-6840-0661; museoebraico.roma.it. A museum visit includes a tour
of the Tempio Maggiore upstairs. Closed Saturday. Admission 10 euros.
Basilica di San Lorenzo fuori le Mura, Piazzale Del Verano, 3; (39-06) 446-6184;
basilicasanlorenzo.it.
The Historical Museum of the Liberation of Rome (Museo storico della
Liberazione), Via Tasso, 145; (39-06) 700-3866; museoliberazione.it. Closed
Monday. Free admission.
Fosse Ardeatine Memorial, Via Ardeatine, 174; (39-06) 513-6742. Free
admission. David Laskin, a frequent contributor to Travel, is the author of “The
Family: Three Journeys Into the Heart of the 20th Century,” due from Viking in
October.