Tempio Maggiore · Florence
A synagogue built to be seen
For three centuries the Jews of Florence were shut inside a ghetto in the middle of the city. When the walls finally came down, the community did not build discreetly. It built a green dome you can see from the hills.
That is the whole argument of this building, and it is why it looks nothing like the streets around it. The Great Synagogue of Florence went up between 1874 and 1882, immediately after emancipation, and it was designed to be unmistakable from a distance. A community that had spent three hundred years being told where it could live made a point of being visible.
The history of the community, the ghetto and what was lost is in the guide to Jewish Florence. This page is about the building itself.
Why a Moorish building in Renaissance Florence
The style is Moorish Revival, and it is one of the finest examples in Europe: horseshoe arches, dense geometric ornament, a copper dome now oxidised to green, and an exterior of alternating stone that reads as deliberately foreign in a city of rusticated palazzi.
The choice was not decorative whimsy. Across nineteenth-century Europe, newly emancipated Jewish communities reached for Islamic-inspired architecture precisely because it was not Gothic and not Romanesque — it did not borrow the visual language of the church, and it gestured instead towards the Sephardi world and the medieval convivencia of Spain. A synagogue in the Gothic style would have looked like an imitation. This looks like a statement.
The same logic produced the square dome of the Great Synagogue of Rome a generation later, for the same reason: so that it could never be mistaken for a church.
Inside
The interior is the part people are unprepared for. Photographs of the exterior circulate widely; the inside is less known and considerably more overwhelming.
Every surface is worked. There is carved wood and bronze, marble flooring, mosaic and gilding running across the walls and up into the dome, and tall stained-glass windows that change the colour of the room completely depending on the hour. The ornament is geometric and vegetal rather than figurative, and it repeats at every scale, so the room reads as one continuous pattern rather than a set of decorated panels.
The layout is Sephardi in feel, in a Tuscan city whose community was historically Italian rite. That contradiction is part of what the nineteenth century was doing here.
The damage nobody repaired
During the Second World War the Nazis used the Temple as a garage for military vehicles. On their retreat in 1944 they mined it. Members of the Italian resistance got inside and defused most of the charges, and the building survived.
Not all of it. The explosives that did go off damaged the columns, and that damage has deliberately never been repaired. It is still there, at eye level, in a room otherwise restored to the last square centimetre of gilding.
It is worth knowing before you walk in, because it is easy to miss and impossible to unsee afterwards. A building this ornate keeping one wound open is a decision, not an oversight.
The Arno flood of 1966 reached the synagogue as well, destroying part of the archive and a number of ritual objects. Florence lost a great deal that year and the Jewish community lost its share.
The Jewish Museum upstairs
The museum occupies two floors of the same building, above the sanctuary, and it is small, meticulous and worth the extra time rather than a box to tick on the way out.
- Ritual silver — Torah crowns, finials, pointers
- Embroidered textiles and Torah mantles, several of them older than the building they now sit in
- Ketubot, the illuminated marriage contracts, some dating to the seventeenth century. If they interest you, the Roman collection is the other great one in Italy — see what a ketubbah actually says
- The upper floor documents the community under Fascism and the deportations. It is the quietest part of the visit
Visiting
What to know before you go rather than after.
It closes for Shabbat
The Synagogue and Museum are shut on Saturdays and Jewish holidays, and the Jewish calendar moves against the civil one every year. Hours also change between summer and winter. Check the day before you fix the day.
Security and dress
There is screening at the entrance, as at every functioning synagogue in Italy. Shoulders and knees covered. Photography inside is restricted, which is exactly why so few interior photographs circulate.
How long, and from Rome
Synagogue, Museum and the site of the former ghetto together run about three hours. Florence is an hour and a half from Rome by high-speed train, so the whole thing works as a day trip without changing hotel. With a second Florence morning, the hidden Florence walk with an art historian is the natural companion.
See it with someone who can get you in
Three hours in Florence with a licensed local guide: the Synagogue, the Museum and the ground where the ghetto stood. From Rome I will build it as a day trip, trains included.