For most Americans familiar with Italian Jewry, the images that linger come from Vittorio De Sica’s evocative 1971 film, The Garden of the Finzi-Continis, the Academy Award-winning picture based on Italian writer Giorgio Bassani’s prize-winning 1962 novel.

Set in Bassini’s picturesque hometown of Ferrara, Garden mixed the beauty of provincial Italy, and the allure of gorgeous young people at ease, with a slowly mounting anxiety—the creeping horror by which Italy in 1938 turned on its Jews, and captured, killed or deported some 9,000 of them.