The Garden of the Finzi-Continis Read Free

it still includes the historic ruins of a sixteenth-century building, at one time a residence or “pleasure ground” of the Este family, bought by the same Moise in 1850, and later, through successive alterations and restorations, transformed by his heirs into a kind of neo-Gothic manor-house, English style: in spite ofso much that is ofinterest in it still, who now knows anything about it, I wonder, and who still remembers it? The Touring Club guide has no mention of it, and this justifies tourists passing through the town. But in Ferrara itself, even the few Jews left who make up the languishing Jewish community seem to have no memory of it.
    The Touring Club guide does not mention the house, and this is no doubt quite wrong of it. But let’s be fair: the garden, or, to be more precise, the great park that surrounded the Finzi-Continis’ house before the war, and stretched for many acres right up to the Wall of the Angels on the one hand, and to Porta San Benedetto on the other, was in itself something quite rare and remarkable (in the early years of the century the Touring Club guide never failed to mention it, in a curious tone, halflyrical and halfworldly), but today it no longer exists, quite literally. All the large trees, limes, elms, beeches, poplars, plane trees, horse chestnuts, pines, firs, larches, cedars of Lebanon, cypresses, oaks, holm oaks, and even palms and eucalyptus trees, planted in hundreds by Josette Artom, were cut down for firewood during the last two years of the war, and the land is slowly going back to what it once was, when Moise Finzi-Contini bought it from the family of marchese Avogli: just another of the many large gardens within the city walls.
    The house itself should be considered. But this big, odd building, pretty badly damaged in an air raid in 1944, is still occupied today by fifty evacuee families belonging to the same beggarly sub-proletariat, not unlike the Roman slum-dwellers, that still keeps thronging the passages of the office in via Mortara: rough, embittered, intolerant folk (showers of stones, I heard, greeted the municipal sanitary inspector when he rode out on his bicycle to have an official look round, a few months ago), who, to discourage any notions about eviction that might occur to the Superintendent of Monuments in Emilia and Romagna, have hit on the bright idea of scraping the last remnants of the old painting off the walls.
    Well, why endanger the poor tourists?-I imagine those who compiled the latest editions of the Touring Club guide wondered. And in fact, to see what?

Chapter Two

    You might call the Finzi-Continis’ tomb “a horror” and smile at it, but you could not, even after fifty years, manage to smile at their house, isolated over there among the mosquitoes and frogs of the Panfilio canal and the drains, and enviously nicknamed the magna domus. Oh, you could pretty nearly feel sore about it still! Suppose you just-say-walked along the endless wall that ran round the garden on the Corso Ercole I d’Este side, a wall interrupted about half-way round by a portentous dark oak gate, without any handles at all; or else, on the other side, peer through the woody tangle of trunks and branches and the leaves below them from the top of the WaU of the Angels where it beetles over the park, till you caught a glimpse of the strange spiky outline of the house, and behind it, very much farther away, at the edge of a clearing, the dun-coloured stain of the tennis court: then the old discourtesy of their disdain and separation would come back hurtfully all over again, almost as searing as it used to be.
    What an absurd, upstart idea !-my own father used to say, with a kind of passionate rancour, every time the subject came up.
    Yes, of course-he admitted-the old owners, the family of marchese Avogli, had the bluest possible blood in their veins; garden and ruins rejoiced ab antiquo in the highly decorative