The first question our friends asked about our vacation in Italy wasn’t how the weather was. They wanted to know how we fared in Europe at this time of protests. Had anyone shouted at us or even attacked us? 

On a recent cruise from Haifa reported in these pages (“‘Tzuris’ in Syros – New enemies don’t deserve our business,” Magazine, August 1, 2025), I was among 1,600 plus Israeli passengers who were prevented from debarking at the Greek island of Syros. When the destination was changed to Cyprus, protesters were waiting there near the beach, causing us to take a detour. 

This week, cruising Israelis were attacked in Crete. Our teenage granddaughter and her friends in Greece were taunted by antisemites. One of our adult children was repeatedly interrupted on an invited lecture in Northern Europe because the research came from an Israeli institution “complicit with the IDF.”  

European concern 

My husband and I were indeed concerned as we departed on our El Al flight for our annual vacation in Italy. For 10 years, we have been going to the same apartment, same small seaside town in the southern Italian region of Abruzzo, about 210 kilometers east of Rome. Between our vacations, the landlord stores our kosher pots and pans, Shabbat accouterments, and beach towels. As we pulled into town, it looked unchanged, except that the St. Agnes café has been renamed Il Buen Amor (good love). 

Even though we’ve been going there for more than a decade, not everyone knows we’re Israelis. We don’t hide it, but we don’t flaunt it, either. It was summer, so nearly everyone was wearing beach hats like us. The Elul shofar blowing from our apartment was obscured by the sound of crashes of glass as the garbage woman dumped the recycled vetro containers into her truck. No one asked about my yellow-polished pinkies or the yellow ribbon drawn on the red nail of my ring finger.  

And, of course, no one could hear the music on my headphones as I swam the waves of the turquoise Adriatic, two kilometers along the shore, to the voices of Hanan Ben Ari, Yoram Gaon, Yonatan Razel, Eden Golan, Aya Korem, Ofra Haza and Yuval Raphael – whom I listened to singing “New day will rise, life will go on” (from Israel’s 2025 Eurovision entry. Thank you, IDF intelligence granddaughter for helping me upload so much Israeli music). 

It isn’t a Jewish area. It’s not Milan or Rome or the ghetto of Venice. Our landlord, who grew up there, said there are no Jewish people living in the town. We didn’t hear any Hebrew, and only a sprinkling of English. We were likely the only ones of the thousands at this family beach resort who woke up with the Houthi missile alarms on our phones. 

Welcomed with hugs 

Still, there were those who knew our country of origin. How would they react to us this year? 

As soon as we arrived, our landlord hurried to see us and gave us bear hugs. He asked: “Before we say anything, I have to know how are your children and grandchildren? Are they all right? The ones in the army, too?” 

He and his wife touchingly texted us offers of free refuge in their rental apartment on Oct. 7, and this last June during Operation Rising Lion against Iran. 

The woman who runs the local tourist agency also ran up to hug me. “I was so worried for you all year,” she said. “I prayed for you.” 

I stopped by the beauty parlor to make my usual appointment. But before we looked at a calendar, there were emotional embraces and expressions of how good it was to see me. The hairdresser, a dedicated runner, hoped to take part in the next Jerusalem Marathon. 

In line in the supermarket, two women from Rome on a seaside vacation asked me where I was from. When I told them “Jerusalem,” they said, “You must have had a difficult year. Enjoy the vacation.” 

Abruzzo’s Jewish history 

Okay, this isn’t all of Italy. There have been protests in Rome and at the Venice Film Festival. But just maybe, let’s hope, the people in beautiful Abruzzo, with its rugged mountains, golden beaches, and nature parks, are typical. 

Although the Italian coast of Abruzzo was once reputedly popular among vacationing Jews from colder European countries, and one of the guest houses still bears a Jewish name, we assumed we were the only Jews or Israelis in town. 

Italy, of course, has a long Jewish history, much of it on the Adriatic coast. In the port of Ancona, 150 kilometers north, Doña Gracia Mendes Nasi led a boycott after a massacre of the local Jews in 1555. To the south, the Jewish communities of Puglia (Apulia) suffered the vicissitudes of Jewish history. We read their emotive Jewish liturgical poems (piyyutim) in slichot (penitential prayers) and on Yom Kippur. There were also internment and concentration camps in Abruzzo in World War II. 

But in the south Italian region today, the most prominent remnants of a past Jewish presence are the odd and ancient fishing structures called trabocchi (singular traboccho). South of Pescara, Abruzzo’s most populated city (400,000), the blue flag beaches of the region’s coast yield to a 40-kilometer distinctive patch of craggy shore line where the trabocchi stand. 

Although some credit ancient Phoenicians, many sources insist that Jewish immigrants built them. The prevalent explanation is that in the 17th century, an extended family of Sephardi Jews fled persecution in southern France for the Italian coast. This was around the time that the 1627 earthquake and tsunami wreaked destruction on the shoreline and the fishing industry.  

The French family’s expertise was reputedly in building wooden bridges, not sailing, and they created these platforms reaching into the sea, with wooden walkways anchored to the coast, leading far out enough to water that is sufficiently deep to catch fish (at least six meters). Five hundred years ago, nets were lowered and raised from these pine platforms through an ingenious system of winches and levers. 

The trabocchi 

Over the centuries, artists have painted and poets have extolled the strange beauty of the trabocchi. The most often quoted description appears in an 1894 novel by Abruzzo archwriter/politician Gabriele D’Annunzio titled Il trionfo della Morte (The Triumph of Death). 

“A strange fishing machine, entirely composed of planks and beams, like a colossal spider. Stretching out from the rocks, like a lurking monster, with its hundred limbs the traboccho had a formidable appearance…. The contraption seems to have a life of its own, to be a living creature.”  

I wonder if the controversial pro-fascist writer, who was no friend of the Jews, knew of their origin. 

Today, the trabocchi house trendy seafood restaurants that feature foods like squid and octopus, which would have alarmed their Jewish ancestors. 

On a day trip to Pescara, my husband and I walked for hours in the city, glad not to see even one anti-Israel graffiti. We passed up visiting the Gabriel D’Annunzio museum and, of course, the trabocchi restaurants. In the city’s outdoor market, I did find a decorative pillow with a drawing of the trabocchi. To me, it is a tribute to Jewish inventiveness. 

The gray-haired proprietor in the linens stall patiently helped us measure tablecloths with motifs of figs and olives to bring home for our children’s holiday tables. When she heard where we were from, she joyfully tucked in her own gifts to us: colorful dish towels. “Gifts to us from the people of Italy.”