Part Two

The heart that you find in Bologna, the seventh largest city in Italy, is a former Jewish ghetto. An order from the Pope made it a reality for nearly 1,000 souls in the middle of the 16th century. The ghetto's inhabitants were expelled before that century closed. It is was never demolished and became frozen in time. It's now something like a miniature city within the city. A walk from the modern train station, strolls through this and that colonnade, a moment at the Piazza Maggiore with its phantasmagorical Basilica of San Petronio (it's so huge it almost seems to float), a slip into a wine-dark network of alleys—all of this will inevitably lead you to the heart: It has very narrow streets, lots of small windows, and apartments stacked on apartments.

And this is my conclusion, and the meaning of this post, which is the second part of a series that ends tomorrow morning: What once wrongfully restricted a community has become in our post-suburban age an urban ideal. The ghetto's density may have looked ugly and even shameful in the eyes of the past (after all, the word ghetto, which has deep Italian roots, is not positive)—but our 21st-century eyes can only find beauty in this place, and even a sign of hope. The future will depend on cities that have this kind of density. What the ghetto also provides is further proof that the universe, which is expanding at a rate that even light can't surpass, is as godless as the bark of a dog, that good and evil are not forms that exist outside of time. An evil can in time become its opposite.