Stories and mysteries of the Holy Inquisition in Palermo

All manner of materials were used, from blood to excrements to smuggled coal.

The Museum of the Holy Inquisition was built 1603-1605 because the “Philippine Prisons” inside the Chiaramonte Palace weren’t big enough to hold the growing number of prisoners.

There were 8 cells on the ground floor and 6 cells on the first floor.

When the Holy Office was closed in 1782, all the instruments of torture and all documents were burnt by the viceroy Caracciolo.

The prisoner’s drawings on the wall were covered by plaster in the 19th century when the building became Criminal Court and archive.

In 1906 the famous anthropologist Giuseppe Pitrè discovered prisoners drawings in three cells. In 2005 restoration work started, uncovering 10 prison cells covered with with drawings made by the prisoners.

Sicilian Jews and the Holy Inquisition 

Step into the Steri Palace and you are immediately plunged into the abyss of one of history’s most blood-soaked episodes – one which saw Jews persecuted, tortured and publicly burnt at the stake.

The walls speak to you simultaneously of tradition and history and persecution and destruction – yet another profoundly dark chapter in the Jewish story.

At the beginning of the 14th century, the Aragonese King Frederick III obliged the Jewish population to identify themselves and their shops with a red mark, a practice that would be hauntingly echoed over 700 years later in Nazi Germany.

Little by little, the liberties of Sicily’s Jewish communities were reduced: synagogues were seized or forcibly moved out of town centres, ghettoisation was intensified, and the long-acquired rights of internal governance trampled on.

Then, in 1478, the Spanish Inquisition was established, signalling the beginning of the end for Iberian and Sicilian Jews.

Over 500 years since the forced expulsion of Sicily’s Jewish population, there are some signs of a renascent community.

When the Decree of Alhambra was issued, some Sicilian Jews left immediately, selling off their property and taking as many of their belongings with them as possible.

Those who were not so quick to leave had most of their possessions and assets seized.

Those that left also took with them their cultural and culinary traditions, a terrible loss for Sicily.

It is estimated that around 9,000 Jews remained. They converted to Catholicism and became known as neofiti (neophytes), the Sicilian version of the Iberian conversos.

Today, little remains of the Jewish communities that once flourished on the island. Two notable exceptions are the miqweh – ritual baths – in Syracuse and Palermo. The former, the oldest and largest in Europe, are located under the Residence Hotel alla Giudecca on Ortigia.

Guided tours are available almost every day. The latter are under Palazzo Marchesi in Palermo’s old town centre, just off Via Maqueda. These are only open to the public a few days of the year, usually in October as part of the Vie dei Tesori.

Fittingly, the new synagogue is located on the site where an old synagogue once stood. Its address, Piazza Meschita, invites reflection, as meschita, meaning mosque, derives from the Spanish word mezquito, an etymological curiosity that intimates a great deal about Sicily’s tortuous, tangled web of history.