JEWISH CULTURE – A tribute to poet Carlo Michelstaedter and Jewish Gorizia

Carlo Michelstaedter ended his young life in 1910 at the age of 23, shortly after finishing his university thesis. A restless thinker and poet, he was one of the illustrious figures of the bygone world of Jewish Gorizia (Friuli-Venezia Giulia), a center of intense intellectual activity in literature, journalism, and the rabbinate. This world, now a thing only of the past, was brought back to life in the exhibition “L’Anima ignuda nell’Isola dei beati” (The Naked Soul on the Island of the Blessed).

The exhibition opened on the European Day of Jewish Culture at the Municipal Gallery of Contemporary Art in Monfalcone (Gorizia) and runs through November 2.

Visitors can access the “exceptional collection” of Michelstaedter’s drawings, caricatures, graphics, notebooks, and albums, explained architect Andrea Morpurgo, one of the exhibition’s curators. An additional value comes from a section focused on the stories and biographies of Jewish families rooted in the area between Trieste and Gorizia. This includes the Morpurgo family, who first moved from Maribor (Slovenia) to Vienna, then to Moravia, Krakow, and Gradisca d’Isonzo, a town in the province of Gorizia.

“The idea was to show how important these families were to the development and identity of the places where they lived,” said Morpurgo, a member of the FBCEI Council. Together with his colleague Renzo Funaro, Morpurgo is overseeing the restoration and recovery of the Valdirose cemetery, where Michelstaedter and other leading figures of Jewish Gorizia are buried.

The initiative dedicated to Michelstadter was not limited to Monfalcone. On September 16, a similar exhibition opened at the Friuli-Venezia Giulia Regional Hall in Brussels, and the plan is to bring it to the Italian Cultural Institute in New York in 2026. As part of the Day’s events, the FBCEI organized a conference on September 16 at the National Library of Italian Judaism in Rome on the theme “Bindings in Jewish Books.” The conference explored the book “both as a work of art, through its structural elements, and as a symbol of a people’s identity.” The event featured Italian and international scholars who discussed the preservation, analysis, and restoration of ancient texts in depth.

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Translated by Matilde Bortolussi and revised by Alessia Tivan, students at the Advanced School for Interpreters and Translators of the University of Trieste, trainees in the newsroom of the Union of the Italian Jewish Communities – Pagine Ebraiche.