The "Little Jerusalem" balanced on a tufa cliff — an Etruscan-Jewish hill town that looks like it grew straight out of the rock
Pitigliano rises out of a volcanic tufa promontory in southern Tuscany's Maremma, a medieval hill town so dramatically positioned it appears to be a natural extension of the rock itself. Its Jewish ghetto and synagogue — one of the best-preserved in Italy, dating from the 16th century when Jews fleeing persecution settled here — earned the town its nickname 'Little Jerusalem.' The streets are carved through the rock, cellars and wine cellars dug directly into the tufa, and the view from the Orsini aqueduct across the gorge remains one of the most striking in all of Tuscany. Visitors who come…
Pitigliano was a major Etruscan centre, and its surrounding landscape is laced with via cava — deep, tunnel-like roads carved through the tufa by Etruscan hands for reasons that still provoke debate (ritual, drainage, trade, or all three). The town passed through Orsini family control in the medieval period, then to the Medici Grand Duchy. Its Jewish community, established in the 16th century by refugees from Papal territories, built a ghetto, synagogue, and community institutions that survived until the Racial Laws of 1938 — the synagogue and Jewish museum are still open.