About Sotoportego

Sotoportego is an independent English-language publication about the history and culture of the Jews of Venice. It takes its name from the Venetian word for a covered passage under a building, like the low, dark passageways that lead into the Ghetto: a way through, from the city to a place that was long kept apart from it.

What we publish

• Ghetto history: the creation of the Ghetto in 1516, the communities that lived there, the opening of its gates in 1797, the racial laws and the Shoah, and everyday life, including the lives of children.
• Books & Haggadah: Hebrew printing in Venice, censorship, the 1609 Venice Haggadah and its modern successors.
• Places & institutions: the five synagogues, the Jewish Museum, the old cemetery on the Lido and the cultural institutions of the Ghetto today.
• Lives & letters: rabbis, poets and writers connected with Jewish Venice, and the literary debates its history has fed.

A short presentation in Italian introduces each article to Italian-speaking readers.

How the articles are researched

• Sources linked and listed. Every article ends with a list of the reference works, scholarly books, institutional pages and press reports it relies on, with links where they are available online.
• Uncertainty stated. Where sources disagree, about a date, a number of deportees or the origin of a name, the text says so rather than choosing the most striking version.
• Only what can be documented. The site has no individual bylines: the editors sign as Sotoportego. Quotations are real and attributed, events are ones that actually took place, and the living or dead people we mention appear only in the roles that published sources describe.
• Retrospective, not announcements. When we write about past exhibitions, residencies or conferences, we present them as history. Sotoportego does not organise events and does not announce them on behalf of others.
• Corrections. If you find an error, the editors will correct it and, when the change is significant, note it in the article.

What we are not

Sotoportego is not a Jewish community, a museum, a university centre or a cultural association, and it does not speak for any of them. It is not affiliated with the Jewish Community of Venice, the Jewish Museum, Ca' Foscari University, Beit Venezia or any organisation mentioned on the site. For religious services, visits, tickets or programmes, please contact those institutions directly. The site carries no advertising, sponsorship or affiliate links.

About this domain

The domain venicejewishstudies.org previously belonged to another project, which used it for its own website. That project is not involved in Sotoportego in any way. When the domain became available, it was acquired for this new, independent publication. Sotoportego does not reproduce the earlier site's texts, name, logo or design, and does not present itself as its continuation. Some addresses from the earlier site lead to new articles on the same subjects, written from scratch, so that existing links remain useful to readers.

Photos

All photographs on the site are in the public domain or published under free licences, and are credited under each image. The full list is on the photo credits page.

Legal notice

Publisher, hosting and privacy information is in the legal notice.