Ferdinando Scianna: The Venice Ghetto 500 Years After

The 44 black-and-white photographs presented here have been selected from the many pictures taken by Ferdinando Scianna on a succession of visits made to Venice between May and June in 2016: they take the form of notes, a series of precise annotations on the course of daily life in a neighbourhood of the city. The result of his work is a lucid and vivid photographic reportage on the Venice Ghetto in the late spring of this year filled with initiatives organized to mark the 500th anniversary of the setting up of the first enclave for the segregation of Jews in the world, the one in Venice. On March 29, 1516, the Senate of the Venetian Republic had in fact decided that all the Jews present in the city should be sent to live together in a courtyard of houses at Cannaregio.