A word for a place you probably don’t want to get to. In the sound, it comes across as the beginning of get away, but the final o can give a mournful hollowness fading away like a dying cry echoed among tenements, especially when sung after the words in the. The look is spookier still, with the gh of ghost to start – and that silent h gives a sense of hollowness realized in a context like this (but quite absent in spaghetti, which this word seems little reminiscent of in spite of the commonality in form, due to the great difference of emotional tone in the referents). The tt could be twin tenements. The flavour of this word is strongly inner-city African-American now, as evidenced by the well-known ghetto blaster (now so common a phrase that the ghetto reference is skimmed across with nary a glance) and the newer ghetto fabulous and similar locutions (including descriptions of things as very ghetto, so ghetto, etc.). But any even passing student of European history – anyone who has learned anything at all about the persecution of Jews in Europe – will know this as a word first of all not for a vaguely defined lower-class area into which people (usually of a single disadvantaged ethnic group) slide and try to climb out but for a sharply defined quarter in which Jews were often forced to live. And where was the first one, the one that gave the name to the type? If you spotted this word as Italian, you were right: Venice, 1516 – a city in which also lived many merchants, as Shakespeare noted. The place name predated this assignation, and its origin is uncertain, but it may have come from and industry that had formerly occupied the island: the flames and smoke of a getto, a foundry.
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Sesquiotica 
The foundry explanation is without foundation. Ghetto is a clipping of the penultimately stressed word borghetto ‘little town’, thus, with omission of the pretonic syllable, bor-.
I took my information from the Oxford English Dictionary, which is not always correct, but it’s not the only source for that proposed etymology; others present it as more specifically possibly from Venetian ghèto, ‘foundry’. The aphetic etymology is also possible, and I should have said so, but a rejection of the former for the latter does require more support than just a plain assertion.
The two chief arguments against the ‘foundry’ etymology are as follows (none is original with me):
First, the Venetian for ‘foundry’ is geto, where represents /ǧ/ (the voiced affricate, which occurs twice in the English word judge, for example) whereas ghetto has /g/ (the voiced stop, as in English agog, for example).
Second, the word ghetto occurs in the names of at least nine other inhabited places in Italy: Ghetto Casale, Ghetto di Mogliano. Ghetto Masere, Ghetto Mavos, Ghetto Petini, Ghetto Piccinelli, Ghetto Randuzzi, Ghetto Tamagnino, Ghetto Tombanuova (all are listed in the Italian directory of postal codes; out of curiosity I googled the last one and it appeared on several websites; maybe all of them do).
So far as is known, those places have no Jewish history and had no foundries.
Therefore, if ghetto in those nine names can be explained only as a shortening of borghetto. it is more than likely that il Ghetto in Venice is a tenth.