All Saints’ Day
Tuesday was Tutti i Santi, All Saints’ Day. Schools, shops, and offices close for this annual day of solemn remembrance, and families visit the graves of their forebears to tidy up and leave fresh flowers. Florists do big business in chrysanthemums, the traditional choice, and cyclamen, another cool weather bloom.
Following a friend’s suggestion we joined the crowds at the cemetery on the outskirts of town to visit the Jewish cemetery, which is inside as the old ghetto was contained inside the city walls. We carried a pot of chrysanthemums to leave at the grave of Marco Levi, the self-proclaimed “last Jew of Mondovì.” Upon his death in 2001, Levi’s estate created a foundation to establish the Museo della Ceramica, where I am a docent for English-speaking tour groups.
At the custodian’s office I asked for the Jewish cemetery, received a key and some simple directions: walk along the perimeter wall until you find a gate. We soon found a high iron gate set in the wall; I turned the key in the lock and we stepped inside. Small gravestones in Hebrew lean beside flat tombs and large memorial markers. Clipped hedges, mostly leafless now, divide the cemetery into sections. We moved along the graveled pathways, reading names and family histories, until we came to Marco Levi. Few of the other graves showed signs of recent attention but Levi’s is well cared for; we placed our flowers in front of his stone beside a vase of mums, another of eucalyptus, and a pot of crimson cyclamen.
Across the way and behind a thick hedge we saw the tomb of Felice Momigliano, a prominent member of the 19th-century Jewish community whose name we recognized from a plaque at his residence in via Vico, a few doors down from our first home in Mondovì. Momigliano’s grave was unattended, a few dead leaves scattered across the large stone, lichen darkening the pale surface, the letters fading and eroded by weather. Among all the other neglected memorials this one seemed sadder to me. That a man once so renowned should be forgotten seemed wrong somehow. After all, we knew of him, recognized his name and his place in the Jewish history of Mondovì.
On Thursday morning I returned. The key to the gated cemetery was just where I’d left it near the main entrance. I unlocked the iron portal and pushed through the hedge, swept leaves from Momigliano’s tomb and left a pot of cyclamen at the foot of his stone to honor his memory. I felt better.
