Must-watchWorld War II · Film · 1970
The Garden of the Finzi-Continis
Il giardino dei Finzi-Contini
In Ferrara, as the racial laws shut Jews out of Italian life, young Giorgio spends long afternoons in the walled garden of a wealthy Jewish family and falls for their elusive daughter Micòl.
Where it happened
Follow the story across 2 places.
Stop 1: Ferrara, Emilia-Romagna
Key location
Barred from the tennis club, Jewish youths gather to play on the Finzi-Continis' private court behind the estate's high walls.
Stop 2: Ferrara under German occupation
The war reaches the garden's gates as the police come for the city's Jewish families.
What really happened
Ferrara had one of Italy's oldest Jewish communities, and many of its members had supported fascism before Mussolini's racial laws of autumn 1938 barred them from state schools, universities, public libraries, clubs and mixed marriages. The film, like Giorgio Bassani's 1962 novel, shows that exclusion arriving through small humiliations: a tennis club membership withdrawn, a library door closed.
After the German occupation in September 1943, the Italian Social Republic declared Jews enemy aliens, and in November 1943 Ferrara's Jews were arrested and sent through Italian prisons and the Fossoli camp to Auschwitz, from which very few returned. Bassani, himself from Ferrara's Jewish community, drew on real families and places in the city.
Where to watch
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Full details
- Original title
- Il giardino dei Finzi-Contini
- Directed by
- Vittorio De Sica
- Countries
- Italy, Germany
- Languages
- Italian
- Released
- 1970
- Period
- –
- Theaters of war
- Mediterranean & Africa
- Themes
- Holocaust
- Romance
