In Rome, history rarely presents itself in chronological order. It rises through broken columns, settles into family recipes and hides behind doorways that thousands of visitors pass without noticing. Few can answer the questions of Italian Jewish communities. When did the Jews first come to Italy? Where did they live? Why did the communities of Southern Italy disappear? What was their relationship with non-Jews? Why were ghettos created? And perhaps the most revealing question of all: When did Italian Jews finally become equal citizens – accepted as fully Italian while retaining a distinct religion, history and identity?

Near the ruins of the Portico d’Ottavia, the scent of artichokes frying in oil drifts through streets overshadowed by the square dome of the Tempio Maggiore, Rome’s Great Synagogue. Travellers come here looking for antiquity. What they encounter, often without fully understanding it, is continuity.

Jewish Italy is easy to overlook not because it is absent, but because it is woven so deeply into the country surrounding it. Its story began before Christianity arrived in Rome. Jews came as envoys, merchants and settlers. After the destruction of Jerusalem, others arrived as prisoners, some carried across the Mediterranean in chains. Captives became freed people, families became communities, and those communities developed prayers, rituals, recipes, institutions and ways of speaking that were at once unmistakably Jewish and unmistakably Italian.

For more than two thousand years, Italy’s Jews have lived through empire and papal rule, ghettos and emancipation, Fascist racial laws, deportation and the Shoah. But endurance alone is too narrow a way to tell their story.

Jewish Italians did not simply survive Italian history. They helped create it. Their influence can be found in the Hebrew books printed in Renaissance Venice, in the work of doctors permitted to leave the ghetto to treat Christian patients, in the mathematics that helped shape modern physics, in Nobel Prize-winning medical discoveries and in some of Italy’s most important literature. It lives in the fried artichokes, sweet-and-sour vegetables, salt cod and fruit-filled pastries whose origins are now so closely associated with Italian cooking that many diners no longer recognize the Jewish histories they contain.

To travel through Jewish Italy is therefore to see familiar cities in another light. Venice’s ghetto is not only the place that gave the world a word for enforced separation. Behind its understated façades existed a cosmopolitan society of German, Italian, Spanish and Levantine Jews – merchants, physicians, rabbis, printers, poets and scholars. Ferrara opens onto the literary landscape of Giorgio Bassani and a Renaissance court that, for a time, offered refuge to Jews expelled from elsewhere. Turin carries the voices of Primo Levi and Rita Levi-Montalcini. Rome speaks through food, family, prayer and a community whose roots extend further into the city’s past than many of its churches.

Yet the most meaningful encounter begins when these places stop being treated merely as monuments to people who disappeared. Italy’s Jewish communities still gather, teach, cook, debate, pray, celebrate and mourn. Children continue to learn the prayers of their grandparents. Families prepare dishes whose recipes trace journeys across the Mediterranean. Hebrew words rise beneath Italian synagogue domes. Shabbat arrives each Friday evening, as it has arrived through empires, expulsions, ghettos, wars and rebuilding.

The candles are still lit. The story is not frozen in museum cases or carved only into memorial stones. It lives and breathes within one of the most beautiful countries in the world – a quieter layer of Italy, perhaps, but one that is essential to understanding the country itself.

In partnership with Marotta Travel Co. and YYZ Travel Group