Jewish Cemetery of San Daniele del Friuli

[…] Go through the village, through the cheerful fields 

Further, down towards the deserted land,

There, out of the way, forced there by enemy laws

Was the cemetery given to the Jews: a small, lonely

Path leads you through the furrows of benign soil:

Difficult to find.

Peaceful solitude, near a lake,

A place to forget, buried in the bosom of Mother Nature

Without name or shade, but in the smooth silence

Of the fragrant, tender, green vegetation.

Here the field of requiems – given out of hatred – is ideal. 

 Surrounded by a modest wall, barely separated from the fields:

Inside and outside, the same plants and grasses grow.

Only the brown stones mark the dead buried here:

Land of peace.

Intimate sweet melancholy fills me in the hour

That before the tomb of a fleeting ancestor,

all the stones on the ground, simple, equal,

without figures or ornaments remember the lives of yesterday,

They carry the name and the date […]

Poem by Guido Ludovico Luzzatto, published in the “Rassegna Mensile di Israel” in 1931