The lanes behind Piazza Unità, the ancient Synagogue, the kosher restaurants along Corso Italia and the historic signs of countless shops that are no more. A compilation of period images from the collection of Claudio Ernè and Fulvio Rogantin - reconstruct in an evocative exhibition in the Synagogue in Piazza Giotti - the unpublished views and atmospheres of a city once rich in Jewish presence, scenes forever erased by the infrastructure renewal campaigns of the 1930s.

Open until Sunday November 8, the exposition offers an emotional and little known glimpse of the violent impact on the Jewish population of the infrastructure campaign which saw the destruction of 181 houses, two religious structure including a Synagogue, seven shops, a hotel and ten houses of tolerance.
The area in which the clearing was focused was Cittavecchia. The “small and modest medeival Trieste, an entanglement of lanes and hovels, hastily declared unsound and overcrowded by the public notices in the newspapers of the day, and thus were destroyed. A part of the city, with its people, its tradition and its gathering places were wiped out to make space for whatever the fascist policies declared necessary.

The heart of the exhibition is made up of images captured by photographer Francesco Penco who returns to the spotlight with this selection of some of his most beautiful work. Born the 10th of November 1871 and too long forgotten, Penco’s camera “froze” in miles of film – with notably modern composition – some of the most important and dramatic popular occurrences of the first half of the last century: from the strike of stokers in Lloyd which ended in the death of 14 protestors at the hands of Austrian troops, to the funeral of imperial heir Francesco Ferdinando who was assassinated in Sarajevo; from the Yugoslavian military occupation of the city in May 1945, to the protests for the return of the city to Italy.

The photographs related to the infrastructure renewal, which were preserved until now by the Penco oblivion, were not shot from a distance, but rather he chose to take them from the vantage of the people, drawn especially by the urbanistic-architectural aspects of the demolition and the ensuing scenes of re-construction that brought to the opening of the space of Cittavecchia with a via triumphalis along which new monumental buildings would sit. Photographs of the various phases of relocation of the population, upwards of 10,000 people, to other quarters of the city have not emerged before now, nor have images of the destruction of the ghetto.

The quality of the photographs exhibited is extraordinary because Francesco Penco used very large film negatives, even as big as 20 by 30 centimeters, which after having been recovered, were digitized and restored with great care. Reprinted from 13x18 cm glass negatives, the photographs show great detail quite clearly.

The other photographer of the exhibition is still unknown. The more than 300 negatives from which the photos were printed, constitute a single body of work recently made available for sale in Trieste. The images were preserved in three small albums of identical size and style, where each 6x9 cm negative is contained in a pocket of pergamin (transparent oiled paper) and includes the date it was taken as inscribed by the photographer with a stylograph pen and blue ink.
All of the negatives were digitized in high resolution and then restored for optimal viewing.

“Stone Memories”
Open until November 8, 2009
Synagogue
Piazza Giotti
Trieste
Tel. 040 632119
Email: This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it
Website: www.triestebraica.it

Exhibit schedule:

• Monday through Thursday 10:00am-11:00am
• Sunday 10:00am-12:00pm (guided visits of the Synagogue at 10:00am, 11:00am, 12:00pm)