The Jewish cemetery, a place of peace and history
The Jewish cemetery of Sabbioneta is located outside the Renaissance walls, beyond the Imperial Gate. The exact location of the first burial area of the Jewish community is not known, although it has been hypothesized that it could have been placed in the courtyard of the current Synagogue. What is certain, however, is that the current cemetery was built in the late eighteenth century on an elongated, rectangular plot of land owned by the Forti family, which was later expanded with an adjacent plot. The last burial dates back to 1937; it is that of engineer Vittorio Forti, originally from Sabbioneta but resident in Milan, who chose to be buried in his home community. After the dissolution of the Jewish community in the early twentieth century, the cemetery was abandoned and some gravestones were destroyed or stolen. After restoration in the 1990s, the remaining gravestones were placed in a corner or repositioned along the perimeter wall; most have inscriptions in Hebrew, with a few Italian translations, present mainly from the second half of the nineteenth century.
