Throughout the early modern period, Italy had the largest number of major cities in Europe. If one takes 10,000 people as a rather crude dividing line, Italy had at least twenty-nine such cities in 1500, thirty-four in 1600 and forty-five in 1700. The comparable numbers at those dates for France were thirteen, twelve and eight; for the Netherlands twelve, fifteen and eleven, and for England four, five and three cities.1 Over the period Paris, Amsterdam and London grew into very large cities, but so did Naples and Rome (see Appendix). Below the 10,000 figure all western European areas had many communities that can be called urban, on the basis of the diversity of a non-farming economy, and England had many market towns with under 1000 people that might be judged more ‘urban’ than, say, Cosenza at 12,000 in 1600. But within Italy one might claim a community like Altopascio or Poppi as urbanised as well at under 1000 people. As already noted, some large Italian cities declined in size through our period, and in terms of complexity of economic activity within sizeable communities, the Netherlands and England probably grew proportionately more urban. This chapter will concentrate on the top category of cities, and derive evidence from them, but much can apply to some città below that level (see Map 3).
Urban living conditions varied considerably from spacious rooms in grandiose palaces to jam-packed basement hovels, shacks in waste areas of Rome, and on roofs perched over more substantial buildings. Most housing was probably high density, cold and damp in winter, stifling hot and fetid in summer, with primitive sanitary conditions – as became clear in reports during epidemics. Housing, mostly stone or brick not wooden, could be many storied and complex – as with the buildings piling up the hillsides in great cities like Genoa and Naples, or numerous Umbrian hill cities like Perugia or Todi. For the most part rich and poor lived in fairly close proximity. Great palace complexes could isolate the rich families: the Strozzi and Medici palaces of fifteenth-century Florence, the Genoese sixteenth-century palazzi off the Strada Nuova, enclaves in eighteenth-century Turin. Similarly isolated were the urban villas of Rome built or expanded throughout the period, or a retreat on the edge of the city like the Palazzo Te in Mantua. Such palace households could be of considerable size, with many servants of different statuses living in, with limited privacy for the leading family members.
Powerful extended families developed enclaves within a city, whether as groups in interconnected buildings along a street, or based on squares. By the fifteenth century Genoa had a number of fortified noble family compounds, as noted by Pero Tafur, visiting in the 1430s. Most were to be broken up or altered in later urban developments, but there are partial survivals of the Doria complex around piazza San Matteo. These enclaves consisted of the houses or palaces of the senior branches of the family (with maybe fifty close relatives living together), with more distant and poorer relatives living in narrow streets running off the square. Shops, ovens and storage facilities, possibly a market, a loggia, common bath facilities and a church or chapel could be part of the complex. This organisation provided a powerful, defensible, social grouping, based on an aristocratic clan, with many dependants, from lesser family members to skilled artisans, shopkeepers, retainers, servants and slaves. With some internal political stability after about 1528, with tendencies towards more conspicuous consumption and display, with desires for more privacy, the leading families made the housing more palatial (as along the Strada Nuova), and diluted the size and importance for wider society of these enclaves. The Genoese patricians, long after others, had a considerable control over ‘public space’, which they arrogantly dominated. Their Venetian counterparts were more subtle. Despite the dominant palazzi on the Grand Canal, Venetian patricians from the sixteenth century tended to build complexes away from the centre, combining a less ostentatious palazzo for the main family, with middle rank and more modest housing for dependants, and for general renting. This allowed for a more consensual control of space and local society. Leonardo Moro’s development from 1544 of the ‘Island [Isola] of Ca’ Moro at S.Girolamo’, has been seen as paradigmatic of this strategy.2
In the main urban space the social orders co-mingled in various cities; or at least the upper orders came close to the popoli since the street floor might have artisan workshops and their living accommodation, as in central parts of Venice. In sixteenth–seventeenth century Milan the patricians tended to avoid the area around the Duomo, where much commercial activity was concentrated, and a certain amount of manufacturing, as of metallurgy and textiles. In fifteenth-century Florence or Perugia the fairly close proximity between the leading families and the artisans encouraged hierarchical social relationships, and patronage systems, that diminished economic–class conflicts in contrast to neighbourhood and factional struggles.3
Commercial, artisan and domestic accommodation structures interrelated in diverse ways. Larger cities in particular had specialist locations for dominant craft-cum- commercial operation, combining work and living quarters, and producing streets of tailors, shoemakers, booksellers (as in Naples), jewellers or retailers (the Venetian Merzeria). Some of these more prestigious activities might be close to the city centre, where professionals like notaries or medics might also live and work – as in Bologna, Milan and Venice. Noisome and dangerous activities were banished to remoter parts of a city, where their specialist workers would also live – tanners, fullers, butchers (if involved in slaughtering and preserving). As humanist architect Leon Battista Alberti said ‘Goldsmiths, silversmiths, and painters may have their shops in the public place, and so may sellers of drugs, habits, and other creditable trades; but all nasty, stinking occupations should be removed out of the way.’4 The zoning of such activities might be dictated by the water supply from rivers, streams and canals – as in Bologna, Perugia or Milan. Dangerous activities such as glass-making could in the case of Venice be confined largely to one island – Murano.5
At least from the fifteenth century growing pride in spending money on housing and decoration was voiced. The Florentine merchant Giovanni Rucellai commented, having built a palazzo to the design of L. B. Alberti (who also defended the morality of costly building expenditure): ‘I think I have done myself more honour by having spent money well than by having earned it. Spending gave me deeper satisfaction, especially in the money I spent on my house in Florence.’6 Michelangelo later argued that: ‘A noble house in the city brings considerable honour, being more visible than all one’s possessions’, and he was keen to have a spectacular house of his own in Florence to emphasise his (exaggerated!) noble ancestry.7 Elite householders varied in the degree of ostentation on the outside of houses. The noble and merchant houses of Florence, Genoa or Perugia might be fairly austere outside, and hide splendours within. Milan buildings were noted as being generally spacious, deep rather than high, with narrow and unimpressive entrances, but more splendid within, and with interior courtyards and small gardens in wealthier constructions.8 In contrast the Venetian facades along the canals were elaborately and idiosyncratically showy, as were the street facades of the seventeenth-century palaces of Lecce, with their sculpted festoons of nature. The exteriors of more humble citizens’ dwellings were in some places more colourful and decorative than they now appear in cityscapes: colourfully painted, and decorated with arabesques, grotesques, mythological scenes and frescoes of marital and domestic virtues. Faded or damaged survivals have recently attracted my attention in diverse cities like Florence, Prato, Venice, Verona, Belluno, Bassano del Grappa, Cividale, Spilimbergo or Udine.
Changing attitudes to material culture and conspicuous consumption, evident from the mid fifteenth century, led to greater comfort and display within buildings. Interior decoration and furnishings were increasingly prized, with tapestries on walls as much as paintings, and spectacular beds and bedding. By the eighteenth century elaborate mirrors, chandeliers and upholstered furniture were also prized for display to visitors for those who could keep open house. Both inventories and illustrative detail from paintings and prints suggest a growing variety of goods through the period. Some examples of vulnerable goods like bedding, clothing and wall and floor coverings have survived, along with greater quantities of more durable goods, whether of metal from iron, copper, pewter to gold and silver, or ceramic and glass, which enhance the pictorial evidence of growing luxury and display. Peter Thornton’s work, and the catalogues for a travelling exhibition of Venetian fashion, the Murano glass museum collection, and a Venetian exhibition of gold and silver provide good evidence of elaborate interiors and possessions available for wealthier consumers.9
Room structure was gradated, with rooms for the inner family providing more privacy, other chambers that might serve family and privy meetings with select outsiders and rooms for full public display and social presentation. In palaces, notably in Rome, elaborate etiquette affected interior design, and how people (inhabitants and visitors) met and moved between rooms.10 Bedrooms could be open to visitors or double as a study. The development of the ‘study’ may be seen as ideal exemplar of status, display and privy sociability. A small, comfortable room, dominated by a desk (though it might also have a bed), it was a place for contemplation (present delights and consolations, and the uncertain future); and it would contain prized books and exotic or unusual objects, scientific and musical instruments. The study could be a secret retreat, and a cosy location for entertaining select erudite friends. Some studies were suitable for intimate concerts. As Dora Thornton stresses, much thought and delight was involved in planning this special living and thinking space. Though seen as primarily a male retreat – his study – Vittorio Carpaccio, a painter who clearly liked study-scenes, suggested also a female ideal study–bedroom in his Vision of St Ursula (Venice, Accademia, c. 1495). Castiglione’s learned mother had her own study; so too did a Venetian courtesan, Julia Lom-bardo, wishing to provide a classical, refined environment for entertaining her clients and lovers.11
Though living conditions for many improved through the period, conditions for the poor and unfortunate could remain grim even in the wealthier and better regulated north-central cities like Bologna or Florence. These conditions were known by governments, and come down to us in the records through heath officials and those called on to help them (such as charitable confraternity members) when facing morbidity crises. They pointed to dank, dirty basement housing where the poor lived in putrid water and excrement. They described women who collected manure from the streets to sell, and kept it in their houses while it accumulated. They noted a butcher in Montopoli in 1607 who had ‘a gully inside his house which is full of all kinds of filth, excrement, guts and other muck, which made the most cruel stench, together with a heap below the shop entrance on to which all the bloody waste falls, giving off an unbearable stench’. The Florentine fraternity of San Michele was called in by the government in 1630 during the plague to assess the poor in Florence, and see who needed new bedding and mattresses (especially to replace what might have been burned in anti-plague precautions). They reported on many ‘houses’ (cramped rooms) ‘where because of misery there is not even the comfort of a bed, people sleeping on a little uncovered and filthy straw, and some others have foul and fetid straw mattresses’.12 Such conditions were alarming to doctors and other officials worried about the health hazards to the population at large, and sometimes to charitable souls genuinely worried about the wretched conditions of some deserving poor.
These conditions for the poorest in the most densely packed buildings probably varied little across the centuries, while interior comforts improved for the majority. As we have noted, it depended on the city whether the fetid poor were in basements just beneath the richer, or in totally different buildings.
Urban space was increasingly controlled in several cities.13 Control was governed by combinations of ideals and practicalities, by plagues, politics and propaganda that might encourage a scenic display. Towns had been planned in the high middle ages – as with new towns in Tuscany – but Renaissance neo-platonism, mathematical theorising and new concepts of perspective led to ideal plans for new cities (which could seldom be realised). These had effects on urban redevelopment in existing cities and towns. While an ideal might be a circular or octagonal shaped city (in part realised from the 1590s in Palmanova in the Veneto), practicalities favoured grid plans with straight streets, and prominent squares in front of the major civic buildings or churches. When Pope Pius II in the 1460s started turning his small Tuscan birth-place of Corsignano into a gem-like small città, re-named Pienza after him, he set a precedent for a combination of ideal city theory, dynastic propaganda and practicality that bore in mind the housing and working needs of those outside the Piccolomini family. This was to affect much later urban activity. Theoretical concepts of social place, appropriate size of housing, and location within a city were taken up by architects such as Francesco di Giorgio Martini and Sebastiano Serlio, who designed houses suitable for nobles, merchants and artisans. In practice Italian planners and builders in cities like Rome and Venice did not segregate the social orders in different zones.14 Motivations behind planning were complex, leading to different configurations where natural features allowed choice, ease of access to public buildings, churches and markets; and thoroughfares which were suitable for the policing of crowds and the domestic population; but did not allow too easy an access for any enemies from without the gates.
In theory, and considerably in practice, the period saw robust municipal controls over urban space and the location of urban populations in the major cities. Rome from the pontificate of Nicholas V (1447–55) developed a body of rules and a bureaucratic system under the Maestri di Strada that led the way in control systems; Venice (with additional problems of canal and water supply control) followed, and then Turin with its later seventeenth-century planned expansion (once firmly established as the single capital of the House of Savoy’s state) followed. In these cities officials sought the orderly development of streets and frontages, and prevented the invasion of public space (whether at ground level or by balconies) by competitive building. Property owners unwilling to ‘modernise’ could be expropriated and entrepreneurial developers and decorators rewarded. There could be incentives for, and controls over, street cleaning and paving. In our period competitive display into street and square spaces replaced the sky-high invasion by competitive ‘defence’ towers in medieval cities like Florence, Siena, Bologna, Perugia and San Gimignano (which retains the most significant number today). Governments and powerful families battled over public display and spatial control, notably in Rome.
In Rome, Popes Julius II (1503–13), Paul III (1534–49), Sixtus V (1585–90) and later Alexander VII (1655–67), had major concerns over suitable pilgrimage routes. This was not merely for practical access and control, but was also meant to offer impressive uplifting inspiration for pilgrims, with suitable vistas opening to statues, obelisks or church facades, and imaginative decoration on the way. The control of street systems, with varying building plot sizes, allowed for the suitable development of palaces and substantial tenements for the richer orders, and moderately sized but more hygienically regulated housing and working places for the middling sort and poor. Sixtus V, aided by architect–engineer Domenico Fontana, laid down the basic structures of modern central Rome. He linked the major ecclesiastical and classical sites, and set street and zonal guidelines for housing the rapidly increasing population. Followed notably by Paul V (1605–21), Sixtus and Fontana ensured a suitable water supply for domestic and commercial purposes, restoring the ancient Roman aqueducts and creating new ones, and allowing impressive fountains to dominate public outlets, to the glory of the papacy, and also of some local families (like the Mattei and Barberini) who utilised them for zonal control. Paintings and prints from the eighteenth century remind us that many of the chief Roman areas remained unpaved, messy and muddy for all the planning and bureaucracy. But Rome’s planning throughout was a prominent example of carrot-and-stick development that went beyond propaganda for Church and Papal State, and benefited the social and economic life of many thousands of Romans.15
Throughout the period Republican Venice similarly experienced governmental restructuring of the city, with a combination of commercial, communication, health and propaganda motivations. Like Bologna, its control systems were medieval, but they became more extensive from the fifteenth century, as standards and requirements of republican and private display became more ostentatious. Dangerously unregulated palace building on the Grand Canal, affecting the canal bed and flow of water, led (especially in the wake of the Ca’Foscari development), to government orders from 1462 that infringed on even the leading families.16 Considerable expertise was needed and developed to control the waters of the lagoon, to maintain shipping lanes, to clear alluvial deposits from the rivers and canals feeding into it; to control and keep usable the inner canals (since refuse and sanitation went straight into them); to ensure wooden piles maintained the increasingly heavy brick and stone buildings (as Venice replaced wooden buildings from the fifteenth century); and to guarantee the elaborate systems whereby fresh cleaned water flowed up into the numerous well-heads in the courtyards and campi (of which there were 6782 in 1858). As with Roman fountains, the Venetian wells and campi were social foci, neighbourhood meeting points and centres for network control by leading patricians.
From 1486 the Venetian government tried to ensure the use of stone to shore up canal banks, wharfs and bridges; some walkways were paved, then increasingly the Campi; the 1500 great Jacopo de’Barberi printed map shows the large Campo San Polo paved. Development of the Zattere (1519–31) and Fondamenta Nova (1590s) took heavier and commercial shipping away from older residential and small-craft areas. The wooden Rialto Bridge across the Grand Canal, centre of the commercial zones, was finally replaced by the stone structure that still exists today, with its prestigious shops, in 1588–91. In the course of the sixteenth century the San Marco area around the Basilica and Doge’s Palace was reconstructed to make it the show area for the city. Old ramshackle and dangerous buildings were destroyed and around the paved piazze impressive government offices (porticoed for access to shops and later coffee houses) were built. These included the Mint (with well-ordered cheese and salami shops on the ground floor), and the Library. Venice gained a spectacular central space, highlighting its republican religious virtues, providing an administrative centre linked to the Republic’s capitalist roles in the Mint and the commercial shopping Merzeria zone and forming a cultural and social centre for the well-to-do.
Other cities witnessed noteworthy urban restructuring under diverse motivations. In the late fifteenth century Naples redeveloped the Castello area – for defence, commercial benefit, new housing, policing control and the easement of the fresh water supply. Street developments and the encouragement of concentrated palace building came in the Via Larga of Florence under Lorenzo de’ Medici, the Strada Nuova of Genoa, parts of Pisa, Vicenza or Verona in the sixteenth century, Lecce and Turin in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In the sixteenth century Bologna developed a central civic and religious centre around the Piazza Maggiore, rather like Venice’s; with the old basilica of San Petronio, governmental palaces of the Podesta and Capitano del Popolo, the Archiginnasio for scholars, a Mint for the continuance of financial leadership, the Portico dei Bianchi clearing away messy old shops and offices, and Giambologna’s vast Neptune statue for symbolic pride. It should be stressed that Bologna (like Milan), then had canals (now hardly detectable) and a nearby port, especially the Reno canal linking the Reno and Savena rivers, facilitating silk manufacturing and exporting, and transit by water to Ferrara and the Po river.
Bologna’s development of its famous arcade or portico system – providing protection from the sun and heat in summer and the snow and rain in winter – which had housing or offices above the walkway took place under strict regulations from the thirteenth century, and continued throughout our period (running to about twenty miles by the end of it). Other cities of the period, from Padua and Modena to little Asolo, had arcaded streets to a greater or lesser extent, but Bologna’s system was the most extensive and organised. The Bentivoglio family which ruled Bologna in the fifteenth century found the porticoes an impediment to police control and troop movements. But in the sixteenth century papal and municipal government legislation made clear that they were developed with twin motives of commercial-social utilitarianism and the beautification of a proud city, to the delight of visitors like Montaigne, who declared: ‘this is a city all enriched with handsome wide porticoes and a very large number of beautiful palaces’. Montaigne was also impressed by the well-ordered brick-lain streets of cities like Ferrara and Venice, and their freedom from mud (unlike Piacenza, unpaved though it was a large city); whereas Florence’s streets were paved with flat stone slabs ‘without method or order’.17
Urban planning and restructuring, and the organisation of water supplies, were crucial aspects of urban social development in the period. They affected population location within cities, the zoning of commercial operations and the profitability or otherwise of certain industrial, craft and commercial enterprises. They could affect hygiene conditions, and lessen dangers of typhus, typhoid and dysentery. Fire hazards were reduced in cities like Venice. Rebuilding and the regulation of house sizes and materials improved housing conditions for many. Facilities became available for better retail shops, more conspicuous display, and (by the late seventeenth or eighteenth century) more open social gathering points, such as coffee and chocolate houses. The more elaborate developments of piazze, campi or broad streets affected public gathering and social inter-relationships, as well as facilitating the better control and integration of corporate bodies (such as confraternities and guilds) in religious and civic processions. The creation or expansion of governmental bodies – such as the Roman maestri delle strade and the Venetian Savii delle Acque – with the employment of experts in water controls, canal and lock building and other building operations, contributed significantly to the professionalisation of urban society from the sixteenth century, at least in cities like Bologna, Milan, Naples, Rome, Turin and Venice.
Some leading professionals were aware of the disparity between the well-regulated public places and fine palaces and the condition of back streets and poor hovels. The voices came loudest in the face of health epidemics and morbidity crises, with calls for the paving of streets, the clearance of cess-pools, the removal of animals (cattle, buffaloes, pigs and geese as Dr Perinto Collodi listed them in 1615)18 and their dung from the urban streets back to the countryside, the clearance of cemeteries to without the city walls, and the promulgation of orders banning the throwing of excrement and refuse straight into public streets and canals. Following the Black Death (1348–50), first in Tuscany, then elsewhere, medical leaders and government officials developed various strategies for dealing with health scares, especially ‘plague’. Florence and other Tuscan cities like Prato, Pistoia or Siena, might have led the way with health boards and control regulations. Milan followed, but by the sixteenth century Venice probably provided in its Sanità organisation the most active and effective permanent institution, operating fairly consistently through crisis and non-crisis periods. This was partly because of the additional complications of a canal-based city, its major international port (with close proximity to the Ottoman Empire from which plague often came, and which did not believe in warning systems or controls), and its high profile in bureaucratic organisation. The Venetian Sanità accumulated many powers and responsibilities as a major agent of social control in the city; it controlled or investigated prostitutes, syphilis, midwives and wetnursing, as well as problems of epidemics and the behaviour of doctors.19
As already indicated, many health scares and calamities occurred through our period. If a plague epidemic was feared in the neighbourhood or along major lines of communication, or actually diagnosed, then major cities (and the lesser cities, towns and villages in the better organised states like Tuscany and the Venetian Republic) brought into play drastic measures for health control.20 Cities, towns and villages might be sealed off; incomers and potentially plague-carrying goods from any suspect area could be banned. Infected persons were carted off to lazzaretti, isolation hospitals and locations such as special islands in the Venetian lagoon. Still healthy members of the household were boarded up in their houses. In full crises artisan shops and other workplaces where people might contact each other were closed, and attempts were made to curb all but very essential movement through the cities. Police bodies, with criminal courts, normal or special, acted to control the populace. They tried to ensure confinement orders were obeyed, that people did not sneak off to their shops to make things to sell, move in or out of the city without control, that neighbours did not rob each other, body-carriers plunder the dead or dying, prostitutes seek clients, nor untori spread plague through their ointments. By the 1590s the Venetian authorities had military guards controlling the borders, shooting those transgressing border controls by crossing or sending goods from infected Ottoman territories. By the seventeenth century within Italy the major states and cities – notably Genoa, Milan, Florence, Lucca, Rome, Venice and Naples – contacted each other over plague. They had agreements on warning systems, on the control of movements of people and goods. However, given the dire economic consequences if the normal manufacturing and retailing systems were stopped, there could be tense relations, breakdowns in reporting processes and mismanagement, as in Genoa and Naples in the late 1640s and 1650s.
The effectiveness of health controls is debated among modern commentators. The medical experts were right to highlight the problems of basic sanitation, involving cess-pits, stagnant water or foul bedding as they affected general health, fevers, typhoid and typhus. In practice, and under political economy restraints, not enough was done about faeces hosting typhoid bacteria. Depending on the plague(s) involved, burning clothing, bedding and carpeting and so purging human and rat fleas (plus lice and mites) might also have helped, especially if the rickettsia organism was around. But quarantining may well have confined far too many close to the vectors of plague, and increased the casualty rate. This quarantining also had dire economic consequences. Carlo Cipolla argues that the blockading and quarantining in the 1630 Florentine epidemic increased unemployment by 150 per cent, and the number of needy from about 12,000 to 30,000 among the 80,000 inhabitants. Food somehow had to be provided for them, as well as bedding and clothes. It is of course impossible to assess what the controls on movements of people and goods between and within cities and towns did to stop or limit epidemics; we know the results when the precautions failed. The increased urban planning, water regulating and street paving probably improved the normal hygiene and health conditions of the cities.
The larger urban communities in Italy produced a great range of goods and services. These might be generated by an individual and his or her immediate family, by the interaction of various individuals and families (as particularly in textile production) who were co-ordinated by merchants and factors, or by a few major production units such as shipyards and factories. Factories in the modern sense of large buildings with machines and intense labour operations were rare before the later eighteenth century, when silk manufacturers in Piedmont started them. In our period the biggest production system was the shipyard, particularly the Venetian Arsenal – though the less studied Genoese and Livorno complexes were also notable. Most production was small-scale, based on units that combined workshop, retailing and domestic living. But behind such production there could be important and sizeable guild corporations, controlling the social as well as the economic lives of full members, apprentices and interlocking non-members. The guilds can be a key to much of the life of the urban dweller, and they affected the relationships with rural areas.
The general argument until recently has been that Italian guilds (arti, sometimes università) – as economic corporations controlling the production of goods and services and the economic lives of the producers – reached their peak by the fifteenth century. Thereafter they have been seen as declining in political power. They ceased to be the key to municipal government, giving way to dominant ruling families or a select oligarchy divorced from direct economic activity. The central political forces increasingly controlled the guilds, or made them irrelevant for overall economic policy of the city and state. However, they still has some control over who could or could not practice a particular craft or trade in a given city; they became increasingly conservative, hostile to innovative techniques and entrepreneurial capitalism. Thus enlightened writers and ministers in the eighteenth century sought to abolish the guilds.
Recent research is modifying the above picture of guild activity and importance. For some leading Italian cities, but notably not Florence, it is clear that the number of guilds increased through to the eighteenth century when they were abolished in some states. New creations matched the elaboration of craft production and the variety of service activities in an increasingly consumerist and materialist culture. Elite guilds of merchants, wool merchants and bankers did mainly become exclusive, protectionist and conservative, but more for social-political purposes than strictly economic ones. Entrepreneurial businessmen and manufacturers could evade guild controls, and move from Milan to smaller towns like Como or the contado. Most lesser guilds seemed more flexible over membership and working practices, and concentrated on such matters, along with philanthropy. They were less political in some local governments like Perugia’s. Highly skilled and prized craftsmen, such as artists and gold–silver smiths, could escape when more mundane guild members proved restrictive, and work freelance or with powerful patrons. Lesser skilled men and women losing out in one occupation could move to a wide-embracing retailing sector, and as in Venice join the flexible mercers’ guild. Guilds spent much time on demarcation disputes with each other, whether over strictly economic confrontations, or social precedence; but this could suggest flexibility and choice for individuals able to play between guilds. Guilds could be promoters of change, guarantors of skills, production standards and living-standards, or (at other times and in other places) impediments to change. The enlightenment and later liberal claims that guild systems stifled the economy and hampered the development of a progressive society are becoming harder to sustain.
Guilds were legally recognised entities subject to statutes, and they tended to become more controlled by the centralising states from the sixteenth century. Each guild should have had its own statutes; and the overall role of guilds within a given city would be governed by the general urban statutes, which by the sixteenth century might be conveniently summarised in a printed form as in Perugia.22 Each guild controlled entitlement to membership, conditions of work, apprenticeships, the quality and often the quantity of production, and the physical and moral health of members. In economic terms the guilds could control the lives and activities of non-members involved in any way with the craft or trade of the particular guild. Apprentices, labourers and servants, though not members, were affected by guild rules and their legal courts. Those entering into a contract with a guild member could come before the guild’s own court. Each Perugian guild had its own tribunal, where rules were enforced with summary justice. A sampling of some early sixteenth-century guild court records in Perugia (for taverners, notaries and hat-makers) showed that most cases concerned the settlement of debts and contracts. Women hat-makers (berettari) were involved on both sides in some cases.23
Such guild courts were run by the leading guild officials. The statutes indicate the perceived importance of hierarchies of officers within a guild, and often their election involved complicated processes. Office-holding could clearly satisfy the power instincts of some members, though also being time-consuming and distracting from business for others (hence fines could be imposed for not taking up a balloted post and fulfilling official duties). Some guilds were overloaded with officials, others managed with very few. The Roman tessitori (weavers) in 1574 had twenty-three officials (for ninety-three members), and the Roman speziali (spice-sellers and grocers) in 1607 had forty-four, though admittedly they had an important church and a hospital to run. But the important and powerful silk guild of Catanzaro only needed six officials in 1569, while in Turin the tailors only needed four syndics to run them in 1612. Given that guilds had many functions, that some were rich – like the wool guild in Florence – in property, and could exercise considerable power and influence in a city, office-holding could have major social attractions. The guilds were often important for the social and religious welfare of their members and relatives, helping widows, marriageable daughters with dowries and the sick and old. Guild officers thus played roles in charitable amelioration and social control.24
Guilds could cover almost any kind of activity, as Rome’s growth demonstrates. The fourteen guilds founded in the fourteenth century incorporated people like merchants, hoteliers and innkeepers, notaries, painters and sculptors, but also wool-workers and various agricultural workers. The fourteen fifteenth-century creations included bankers, industrial workers like glassmakers, blacksmiths, furnacemen, but also German bakers. The twenty-three new guilds in the sixteenth century organised many more food producers, but also public writers and copyists, printers and booksellers. With an urban transport revolution, coach drivers were bonded together. Humbler folk like cleaners, refuse collectors and second-hand dealers now had their own guild organisation. In the next century the twenty-four foundations recognised the greater variety of food suppliers, as of fish, sausages or vermicelli and other pasta, but also hatters and sellers of delicate slippers. Finally the thirteen creations up to the 1760s recognised those indulging themselves thanks to sellers of wine, spirits, tobacco, or seeking adornment from wig-makers and hair-dressers. Guild support was clearly necessary for those battling in the new competitive drinks market, as Roman society became more refined and, in some ways, public in coffee houses and brandy shops.25
Venice saw some similar patterns of guild growth until it had about 130 guilds in the seventeenth century. But this total included large guilds with various semi-autonomous subsections, whereas Rome had allowed such to break away completely. The Venetian Arte dei Fabbri by the seventeenth century combined twelve different kinds of metal workers, hitherto independent: workers in iron, copper, bronze, brass, tin, pewter, gunsmiths, scale makers, tinkers, used-iron dealers, hardware dealers and nailmakers. The Arte dei Depentori similarly now combined painters, miniaturists, leather-gilders (coridoro), gilders and frame-makers (indoradori and soazeri), cloth pattern designers (desegnadori).26
The appearance of new guilds, or recognised sub-sections, reflected new products, trades, and refinements of living. From the fifteenth century we have a surge of hat-makers; the appearance of guilds for printers, paper makers and sellers and booksellers from the sixteenth century, as printing became very much more widespread; musicians from the sixteenth century as they moved away from church domination. Wig-making moved onto the scene in the seventeenth century, in Milan and then Rome especially. The growth of the silk industry led to diversification in guilds, as did the armaments industry in Brescia and Milan, and dependent areas; not only because guns and other weapons became more complicated, but because some purchasers wanted status-implying decorations and refinements, beyond functional purposes. Merchants might battle against old entrenched corporate bodies within a major city, putting out work for lesser towns and villages. In response to what was at times a cheap labour exploitative situation those involved might in turn become essential experts, and respond with their own guilds; this happened in 1758 with the gunlock makers of Lumezzane who were part of the armaments industry of Brescia and the Val Trompia.27 The rising importance of Turin from the later sixteenth century, as the House of Savoy transferred its power base from France to Italy, from Chambery to Turin, is shown by the late foundation of important guilds such those for bankers (1589), tailors (1594) and saddlers (1658). The eighteenth century incorporation of watch-makers, makers of gold and silver buttons, or locksmiths suggests a degree of industrial diversification and specialisation.28
The guilds as they had developed by the fifteenth century varied considerably from city to city in whom they included as members. The main issues were whether major merchants, employers and masters were in their own exclusive corporations (as in the Florence wool-guild, Calimala), or were in the same guild as the associated journeymen and assistants (as in many Venetian guilds); whether subsidiary workers in the wool, linen and cotton industries were in one or two guilds, or had their own independent guild for each specialism; whether the least skilled workers were incorporated with legal rights, or formed a vulnerable proletariat. Many guilds had three main categories of members, masters, workers (lavoranti) and apprentices/ assistants (garzoni). Statutes dictated the length of apprenticeship, the conditions needed to move to the lavorante status, and then full mastership. Mostly decisions were made by the guild masters themselves, but through the early modern period outside governments, notably in the Papacy and Savoy, controlled those allowed to operate a craft, trade or profession. Typically the garzoni was a teenager, a qualified lavorante in his 20s and 30s (and hoping to be a master), and a master in his late 30s or older.
Relations between the different levels of artisans probably followed no easy pattern. Some small enterprises, such as a printing works, may have been ‘family’ and co-operative; but we can balance (below) fraught situations around artist studios. Many craft occupations involved dangerous operations, with fires, dyes, presses and cutting machines suggesting a need for co-operation and trust. But there could be major tension between, say, master bakers and workers, though a Venetian example had the added complexity that Venetian masters were using German assistants – with religion, ‘nationalism’ and rival guild pretensions involved.29 Where, as in textile operations, a heavy imbalance existed between a select group of powerful masters, and numerous workers and apprentices – often outside a guild structure and its protections – relations could have been tense, and exploitation harsh, directly or through managers. The 1378 Ciompi revolt in Florence may have warned the masters to be more accommodating. We know that a leading Florentine silk manufacturer, Andrea Banchi, in the fifteeenth century was solicitous about his workers, male and female; trying to keep good workers, reducing pressures when they had difficulties and fostering loyalty by securing cheaper wine and oil for them.30
A workshop or bottega had its hierarchies, whether all, some or none were controlled by a guild. Insights into a ‘workshop’ – though not one now under guild control – can be gained from knowledge of the painter Agostino Tassi (d.1644), now hardly known but in his day well patronised. Information is derived from his various trials – for rape (of the young painter Artemisia Gentileschi), and incest (with his sister-in-law Costanza Cannodili).31 Tassi, despite his violent record, died as a rich man in Rome with a house on the Corso, servants, carriage and horses. But much of his life can illustrate the artisan’s world – and its tensions – partly because, though a talented fresco painter, he seems primarily to have made his wealth through organising art workshops. Though he exaggeratedly claimed a thousand apprentices and assistants, he certainly had many. They worked on major fresco cycles for palaces (including the Quirinal, Lancelotti and Patrizi-Clementi), cartoon designs for tapestries and ephemeral decorations for religious and secular festivities. Unlike (allegedly), the more famous painter Cavaliere D’Arpino, Tassi himself worked and lived on site for distant fresco projects and painted ephemera, while co-ordinating many projects. While Tassi organised a number of site workshops (cantieri) at the same time for several Roman palace projects, much focused on a household and workshop that promiscuously mixed family life, training, production and immoral pleasures. When Tassi was on trial for incest in 1619 he was living in a rented apartment on via della Lungara, with his sister-in-law Costanza, her painter husband Filippo Franchini, their two daughters and a wet-nurse. Three assistants were part of the household, but others temporarily slept about the place when business was brisk. Agostino’s well-lit bedroom was also the main studio, while bigger paintings were produced in the darker dining-room. Later he had larger premises, with slightly more privacy for the immediate family, but with other trained, assistant painters and apprentices living in the household. Boys might start aged about 11, be employed to grind colours, keep the studio tidy and be general ‘servants’, and be taught to draw, in return for food. Some, like G. B. Primi, for a while paid to be trained as draughtsmen and painters; but ended up receiving lodging, food and payment as assistants. The Tassi studio systems – involving different kinds of working and payment arrangements, depending on age, skills, needs and ambitions, in a linked household and workplace environment – were probably typical of more than the artists’ artisan world, even if tailoring, smithing or selling drugs and groceries did not have such a fluctuating need for extra assistants for projects.
The social environment of sex and violence was less typical. Even if some charges were exaggerated, the Tassi circle was involved in much fighting and violent sexual activity; some assistants with mixed feelings had to accept the services of Agostino’s mistresses instead of financial rewards and payments. Agostino’s wife Maria (sister of Costanza) had fled in 1610 with another man, and Agostino was rumoured to have murdered her. He was accused in both 1611 and 1619 of incest with Costanza, but this did not break up the household-studio. Had Agostino and Filippo Franchini agreed to share Costanza? Agostino’s condemnation in 1612 for raping Artemisia Gentileschi (while teaching her painting in the absence of her painter father) seemingly led to a sentence of exile; but the patronage of the papal Borghese family had the sentence revoked. Freed from prison he continued his studio work, which grew apace. His assistant Primi had fled to Genoa when Agostino threatened to amputate his arms (either for stealing drawings or for denouncing the incest), but years later (1641) after some successful work in Genoa he was back in Rome, living with Tassi and Franchini. While Claude Lorrain might be the only recognised top rank artist to have been trained by Tassi’s workshop, it is clear from the experience of Primi and others that – despite the unseemly ambience – the workshops and dependent artistic networks provided comfortable careers for many middling artists, such that it was unwise to break out of the connection. Tassi largely got the named credit, and highest share of the payments, as the master painter.
The above example reflects on a workshop scene, though not one in this case subject to guild controls, since most painters were by the seventeenth century outside the strict guild system – for good or ill. The extent to which it was mandatory to be a guild member to exercise a trade or craft varied over time and place. In most cases involving specialisms, membership would be compulsory, and so stated: for example all goldsmiths, soap-makers, linen-workers, innkeepers in Rome; all tailors, shoemakers, masons in Bologna; all silk-workers in Catanzaro. But in Venice from 1517, fustian producers who worked at home without employees were exempted from membership, as in Verona were various dealers in paper from 1674. Governments could also readily exempt individuals they wished to favour. While Prato had some twenty-one guilds in the late fourteenth–fifteenth century, they hardly feature in the lives of a group of seventeen diverse minor local merchants and retailers whose account books have just been studied; they were innkeepers, cheese sellers, druggists, butchers, a waller, a grain seller and a second-hand dealer. If they were guild members, it seemingly mattered little.32
Membership figures, for the active or passive, are hard to establish. For Perugia in the later fifteenth century, I estimated about 1900 guild members for a city of 16– 19,000 persons; or 4–5000 adult males. Perugia in the early fifteenth century could record 165 members of the Mercanzia (dealing mainly with wool, leather and cereals), 182 taverners, 25 potters. For Venice, R. T. Rapp calculated that about two-thirds of the work-force belonged to guilds that were required to provide men for galleys; in addition there were members of the Arsenal and other exempt guilds (lawyers, notaries, hatters, distillers and others).33
Guilds frequently conflicted. The diversification of guilds and the incorporation of specialisms, added to the potential areas of dispute, as to who could do and sell what, or utilise what materials and suppliers. Could guild-organised purveyors of food monopolise the selling of produce in the major squares of Bologna or Rome (as around the Piazza Navona), or could contadini come in and sell directly from their own stalls, barrows or mere baskets? In Bologna and Venice, makers of new shoes conflicted with those who repaired and adapted the old; while all these challenged specialist tanners and butchers as to who was allowed to tan the hides for shoe leather. Silk manufacturing, as in Genoa, Lucca, Naples or Milan, saw many conflicts between different guilds, or between guilds and independent merchants organising putting-out work; while arguments over tailoring in Turin or hat-making in Bologna, Modena and Carpi have recently been highlighted. Much of this might seem socially and economically detrimental; not conducive to efficient and cost-effective production, and so contributing to Italy’s ‘backward economy’. However, some disputes probably defended standards and efficiency, saved individuals from gross exploitation and provided corporate protection that contributed to a more stable society balanced between extremes of rich and poor. The fact that wrangles were lengthy suggests nobody was totally victorious, nobody totally defeated. However protectionist, conservative and male-dominated some guilds might have been, most urban economies seem to have had room for innovative entrepreneurs, for illegal or semi-legal interlopers (from within or outwith the state), for pedlars (whether legally incorporated or not) and for women to have their roles and some prosperity, especially in retailing.34
The Venetian Arsenal was the largest industrial complex in Europe for much of our period, to be overtaken by London only from the later seventeenth century (see Map 5). The government inevitably was more interventionist over guild activity than elsewhere. The surviving outer walls still give an idea of its immensity, while many surviving drawings, prints and paintings show its internal structures in our period.35 Further it was a more complex, integrated and controlled industrial area than anything in London, Amsterdam or Livorno. It involved not only ship building and repairing, but also the making of sails, ropes, pitch, and the manufacturing of guns. In many ways it was socially a separate city, with a degree of loyalty and identity of its own. The complex was governed by officials responsible to the Senate, though three major powerful guilds of shipwrights, caulkers and oarmakers on the ship building and repair side controlled much of the labour force down the line. The workforce was fluid, difficult to control and calculate – as much from its privileged position as from the vagaries of employment. The numbers working on a daily basis fell far short of those officially enrolled in the guilds. Once accepted as masters or even apprentices the men might split their activity between the Arsenal and private shipyards elsewhere. When the latter were suffering, there were guaranteed jobs, or payments, back in the Arsenal. A recognised master might work most of his life in the private sector, but return to easy jobs in his old age. In 1559 the three guilds had 2183 enrolled masters, but only 960 seem to have been regularly active in the Arsenal. The government through the seventeenth century attempted to curtail this discrepancy, as shipbuilding in the Arsenal declined, and ensure a smaller but more consistently active work force. In 1696 the three major shipping guilds had 1282 enrolled masters and 486 apprentices, with 984 masters and 282 apprentices active.36 They tried to insist enrolled members worked a minimum of 130 days, out of a normal working year of 265 days. Inducements such as special wine rations were used, doubtless explaining the difficulty of getting workers in on Mondays – ‘Saint Monday’ – after Sunday celebrations.37 The full workforce in the Arsenal was possibly double the above number, when members from other smaller guilds – such as mastmakers, smiths, gun-carriage makers (carreri), cask makers – and non-guild labourers and porters are counted. Women appear as workers in the main industrial activities of the Venetian Arsenal, as well as being landladies, brothel-keepers and shopkeepers in the district. One unusual worker was Marrieta Battaglia Rubini, sentenced by the Inquisition in 1639 to a whipping and one year’s imprisonment for practising magic. After three months she petitioned to be released to serve the rest of her sentence stitching sails in the Arsenal, at half pay – as apparently had been allowed for other prisoners. She duly served seven months.38
In the seventeenth century the building of new ships seriously declined, though repair work and gun-making might flourish. The Arsenal workforce was smaller but it had a more close-knit hereditary family structure, and state employment offered some security. Many smaller private shipyards (squeri ) existed elsewhere, but their prosperity was more precarious. A moderately substantial wooden squero of the seventeenth century survives in San Trovaso. The living quarters were above the construction and storage areas.39
By the seventeenth century Livorno was the most advanced port in Italy, though not such a diverse industrial complex.40 From 1544 it had been developed as the main Tuscan port to replace the silting-up port of Pisa. Jetties, a customs house and an arsenal were soon built; deep docks, a new fortress (1590), a well planned city and storage areas followed. A canal (started in 1560), gave ready access to the Arno river. Grand Dukes through the period fostered this port, with special tax concessions or tax exemptions, though it was not officially a ‘free port’ until 1675. In the interests of commerce and international trade Counter-Reformation scruples were overcome and Jews (and converts, conversos or marranos) were encouraged to settle, and trade from there. They had little difficulty shifting between Jewish and Christian identities as required in their travels. Armenians with similar international connections and access to the Ottoman Empire were likewise attracted; in the 1660s the Armenian Antonio Bogus may have been the biggest ship owner in the city. To populate the city, the Tuscan government allowed criminals and banditi (see Chapter 11) to be absolved of court verdicts, or to live safely as exiles from scenes of crime elsewhere, and settle. It became the centre for disposing by many nationals of plunder gained from raiding each other’s ships. As the dragoman Giovan Battista Salvago told the Venetian Doge in 1630:
Algiers and Tunis are full of merchants of all nationalities – Livornese, Corsican, Genoese, French, Flemish, English, Jewish, Venetian and others. These merchants buy the plundered goods and send them to the free port of Livorno where they are distributed throughout the whole of Italy... Trade in plunder is the real incitement to piracy; if it didn’t exist, the plunder would go to waste in Barbary and the pirates, with their useless booty, would lose interest.41
If Venice was the main loser, the Tuscans gained. Livorno, as we have noted, became the centre of English operations. They benefited in particular from the modern storage facilities, especially for olive oil and fish. For much of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries Livorno was a polyglot, international city, fostered by the Tuscan Medicean and, later, Habsburg governments.
Much social intercourse outside the home combined business, leisure and social manoeuvring, whether in streets and piazzas or indoors. Sociability in indoor public places became more varied from the later seventeenth century in larger cities, especially with drinking establishments for coffee, chocolate and brandies.
Tomaso Garzoni’s Piazza Universale (1585) is emblematic of the social intercourse of urban Italy in the middle of our period. He envisaged all classes meeting, but located with due gradations in their stance and movement from the central position of the nobles and gentlemen, to the fringe positions of the latrine and refuse cleaners. The piazza, or main central thoroughfare, as meeting place for all saw changes through the period. City planning made them safer and healthier, with paving and cleaning, as well as more visually spectacular. Stalls, carts, shacks as points of sale were often removed (except intermittently for major markets), and more secure shops established on the perimeter. Use of the piazza for small or large gatherings was affected by religious reformers seeking to clear the churches of non-religious meetings, throwing out the money-changers and lawyers, if not lovers on trysts. Concentration of power in regional states, with their princely and elitist rule, removed some of the ‘political’ meetings, the parlamenti, that had existed to ratify government decisions, new councils, or the take-over by a new signore. The piazze and large thoroughfares remained the locations for major religious parades and for theatrical activities, where all levels of society could gather together; even if the nature of the religious gatherings changed, or gross frivolity in the fifteenth century gave way to more serious saintly festivals from the later sixteenth. The latter need not exclude street parties, and fountains of wine.42
Different levels of society met in business establishments, workshops and retail shops. Bottega was the word used then for such places, not just a modern ‘shop’. The same location could be used as home, workshop and retail outlet. Counting botteghe has proved problematic, given the problems of definition, and the huge turnover in selling points. Florence in 1561 had 2172 officially recognised botteghe, for a population of 59,023, though some of these were clearly for manufacturing only and not selling. Among the most numerous involving retailing, there were 96 shops of shoemakers or cobblers, 31 hosiers, 131 bakers, 99 wood-sellers, 101 mercers (6 classified as large-scale), 69 tailors, and 66 second-hand clothes dealers (rigattieri). Rome in 1622 (population about 120,000) had over 5500 botteghe, with 1582 selling cloth and clothing, with or without other goods. The speed with which new shops could emerge is shown by some Venetian figures: 517 new retail outlets were registered in the years 1561–8, including 170 mercers, 95 druggists – and even 27 surgeons. Bologna in 1758 had 1232 botteghe and ‘banchetti ’ from about 89 guilds; these included 200 outlets for shoemakers and cobblers, 31 for tailors, 54 mercers, about 166 food retailers (including 25 selling bread) and 78 for second-hand dealing, but only four bookshops and one printing shop. The numbers of individuals involved is not clear.43
Documents from Pistoia for the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries show us very simple retail points tacked onto houses, displaying goods on the street, with no public entry into the building. A significant Florentine palace like the Palazzo Ginori had its own commercial outlet – for selling the ‘house’ wine produced by the family properties of the Sesto Fiorentino and elsewhere.44 Surviving old shops in Venice show the more substantial combination of workplace and selling point that would have been a feature of several commercial cities. Good examples in Venice of two-storied shop and housing complexes can be found in the Castello area: along the Calle del Paradiso (based on fourteenth-century structures), Salizzada S.Lio, Salizzada dei Greci for example. The shop inventory (1653) of a second-hand clothes dealer, Girolamo Targa, records shelving all around, a bed, bench, cupboards, ladders and fire-irons. An awning protected shoppers and the display from the sun.45
Because of the interaction of creation and selling, working conditions by the end of our period in large cities at least could be elegant. In an anonymous eighteenth century painting in the Ca’ Rezzonico, Venice, The Lace and Embroidery Workshop, a male customer is discussing with a woman details about a coat, velada, on the embroidery frame; elsewhere in the room women are spinning, winding and bobbin lacemaking. Another visitor plays with a dog, watched by an elaborately dressed lackey. Paintings hang on the walls, and padded furniture awaits customers.46
Buying and selling took place on streets, as well as in botteghe, at market stalls or by makers and sellers coming into houses. Itinerant sellers of many kinds were clearly part of the urban (and to a lesser extent village) scene. From the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries images of pedlars and specialist street-sellers, men and women, abound, as shown by the eighteenth-century engraver G. Grevembroch,47 or Venetian painters, including the notable Pietro Longhi, and more obscure Gaetano Zompini, who produced prints and terze rime poems about their activities. Sellers came round to houses or stood on the streets with their baskets, selling breads, cakes and doughnuts, fruit, nuts and vegetables, eggs and cheese. Itinerant cobblers or carpenters made repairs at the door; there were pedlars dealing in second-hand cloths, clothing or utensils. In Venice and Turin by the eighteenth century the shop-based shoemakers and cobblers had bitter conflicts with the ambulatory shoe-repairers and sellers of second-hand shoes. Attempts to clean up urban spaces, to discourage the hassle of street-selling, encouraged the development of some permanent retail outlets, such as food shops in San Marco and the Merzeria in Venice.48
In Venice at least some pedlars (revendigoli), who traded in a whole range of goods, including foods, were officially recognised as part of the guild of second-hand dealers (strazzaruoli). This allowed them to sell old furnishings and clothes as well as other goods. Such pedlars admitted to this guild lacked the apprenticeship training (five years) of the strazzuaroli, which would have allowed them to alter, repair and refashion their goods. Their poverty meant they could not set up shop like proper second-hand dealers, they stated in 1621; they seemingly were unskilled male and female workers on the fringes of the commercial system, both scraping their own living, and probably benefiting the master strazzaruoli by helping the distribution of goods they had acquired.49
Public auctions were part of institutional business and ways for private individuals to raise money. These might cover properties, offices and tax contracts, but also personal goods. The Florentine Office of Wards held auctions to settle estates. Pawn-broking institutions (Monti di Pietà) auctioned off unredeemed pledges after a given period, to add to the cash supply for loans, or help (in Perugia’s case) the local hospital. Courts through auctions raised money from confiscated properties of criminals. On a death, property and goods might be auctioned to raise money to fulfil the testaments. Sales and auctions were held in the streets and under porticoes, or in hostelries, involving a wide social mix of persons. The living, rich or poor, resorted to auctions similarly to utilise assets; and purchasers could obtain luxury goods as well as necessities. Auctions were a significant, and well-regulated, part of the second-hand economy, for Christians and Jews.50 Obtaining second-hand goods from economic or social superiors could enhance one’s own status and prestige; the acquisition of antiques, books, works of art could be a way of entering a new cultural milieu.51
Shops and workshops could be centres for recreation and long discourse. A Venetian apothecary at the Due Colombini (the two little pigeons) in the 1580s had his premise used for playing chess; behind this activity a dissident priest organised meetings of like-minded evangelicals.52 Bookshops were useful meeting places for discussion, for playing games and for the circulation of new, maybe dangerous, ideas. A bookseller in Venice called Vincenzo had people playing chess and tarot in his shop; and the Inquisition in 1570 suspected they also held heretical discussions. The numerous tiny bookshops of Naples fulfilled such roles from the seventeenth century to at least the mid 1970s. The great Neapolitan philosopher of history, Giambattista Vico, was self-educated in a whole range of old and new ideas in the bookshops run by his father and friends. Some idea of such an environment is given in an anonymous painting exhibited at a 1996 London exhibition on the Grand Tour, showing Bouchard & Gravier’s bookshop in Rome, about 1774, with louche intellectuals and earnest monks studying books and prints.53
The restrictions on public sociability for women, especially for the young, of course remained considerable until very recently. For them meetings in church might count as the most favourable respectable opportunities for encountering others, whether secret lovers or female friends. Visits to a confessor in the Counter- Reformation period provide the one real opportunity to escape the home; to him they might pour out their sexual, marital and domestic problems as to nobody else – and then find themselves taken advantage of by the equally frustrated and lonely confessor. Involvement in Christian Doctrine teaching in the confraternities of Christian Doctrine or just alongside the parish priest and curate might provide more opportunities for social contact. In a more secular context, the development of the horse-drawn carriage from the sixteenth century allowed richer females to take to open places in the key cities, under some male escort – most notoriously the older male friend or lover, the cicisbeo, in seventeenth and eighteenth century Rome or Naples, who might also be the escort in the opera boxes of these cities or in Venice. Attempts to converse from out of carriage windows contributed to the traffic-jams of Rome. Visual evidence suggests that by the eighteenth century well-to-do women in Venice (where earlier they had been fairly restricted) or Rome could go shopping in a fairly leisurely way, and visit coffee or chocolate shops, presumably under escort.
Inns and taverns were meeting spaces for all sorts and conditions of men, and a more limited choice of women; places full of excitement and danger, surprises and routine business. They could be scenes of murder and mayhem, especially in remoter areas, or of encounters between foreigners and natives in the cities, or places where local residents could borrow money, pawn goods, or purchase second-hand goods (legal or illicit). Both Garzoni in his Piazza Universale (Discorso 98) and Venetian authorities attacked taverns as places where all sorts of vicious practices were perpetrated, including the fencing of ill-gotten goods. In 1599 an official from an employers’ organisation in the woollen industry confiscated cloth being offered in an auction of tavern pledges, alleging the cloth had previously been stolen. Through to the eighteenth century second-hand goods were profitably interchanged between the Ghetto Nuovo and neighbouring Christian taverns of some dubiety.54
The Venetian inns could also be gambling dens, with dire effects, The government in 1571 alleged that gamblers went to inns ‘to satisfy their immoderate appetites [and] leave their wives and children to die of hunger in the house, because in these conventicles of drinkers they speak without respect of any quality of person, they blaspheme, gamble, luxuriate, and finally indulge in every sort of depravity’.55 Inns were good meeting places for the exchange of ideas, and could rightly attract the attention of worried authorities. John Martin has argued that: ‘The Tavern was a haven of unhampered discussion in the early modern world’.56 In the 1540s and 1550s Venetian authorities were concerned with discourse in taverns such as the Aquila Nera (Black Eagle) and Leon Bianco (White Lion) near the Rialto, where Germans might spread heretical ideas. Investigations of a tavern near the Rialto fishmarket in 1569 unearthed a network of contacts with Modena; the inquisitors there then heard from a witness about tavern discussions of Lutheran ideas back in 1565. When the Venetian inquisitors investigated evangelical craftsmen in the San Moisè parish they were told about such religious discussions not only in confraternities, but in the local taverns. Many of these were workmates who had learned to trust each other, and moved their social-religious discourse into a more public domain.
Inns were of course primarily for travellers rather than residents. Northern and central Italy had many, of varying quality as foreigners often commented. Rome had 236 recorded inns in 1526, and 360 in 1615; in 1561 there were forty inns in Florence (stable population about 60,000), and Como (population 8000) had sixteen in 1553.57 One of Milan’s eighty-eight inns could hold 1100 travellers. Southern Italy was seen as short on inns for travellers until well into the eighteenth century. What might be encountered there is illustrated by Louis Ducros in a sketch of an inn at Barletta, and his journal entry. He and his Dutch companions ate in a cavernous room serving as a large kitchen and storeroom:
full of all kinds of filth, besides our muleteers; the wind and rain were coming through holes in the roof of the house made by the weather, and sometimes pieces of it were coming through the roof into our soup or stew. We were quite convinced that the beds we had been given were normally home to a good part of the town’s bedbugs.58
Through the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the variety of drinking establishments where people might meet expanded considerably in the major cities, to include coffee houses, chocolate shops or brandy dens, to add to more long-standing wine bars and inns. Venice had a major coffee house (All’Arabo) in the Piazza S.Marco from 1683, and this square alone soon had about thirty-five (some selling acquavita and ices as well). But it was the establishment in 1720 of Florian’s that launched the famous refined society coffee-house fashion. Bologna had thirteen Caffettieri in 1758, all in the city centre. Roman archives document the intense competition in the eighteenth century to open such establishments, to manipulate the rules to diversify the supply of such beverages, as Roman authorities sought to limit the numbers per piazza or main street and to protect privileges accorded particular guilds. A drawing by David Allan reveals a more sedate coffee house in Rome, about 1775; it allowed space for reading, or convivial conversation over the billiard table. The exterior of the notable Caffe degli Inglesi appears in another of his drawings of the Piazza di Spagna. Pietro Longhi and other Venetian artists depict luxury and gentility in coffee houses, sometimes implying seduction and flirtation.59 A periodical called Il Caffé, published in Milan 1762–4, made significant contributions to the Enlightenment.
Far more dubious were the ridotti and casini of Venice as social gathering places; these words covered a variety of occurrences and/or places primarily associated with gambling. They varied from reasonably respectable salons in palaces, to seedy dens; places for gambling, flirtation and sexual activity. Pietro Longhi’s paintings provide us with the luxurious, louche, image of a ridotto or salon of the Ca’ Giustinian; but Jonathan Walker’s archival researches reveal more sordid evidence on major gambling, cheating, violence, prostitution and rape. While the government might licence ridotti and casini as semi-permanent organised places for controlled gambling and ‘honest conversation’, the Senate and other bodies frequently attacked the excesses of such gatherings, and ‘prohibited places, where public and infamous ridotti are held, with gaming, drunkenness, and other dishonesties, from which ridotti those that hold them... obtain profit and income’ (1598). Such places could lead to fraud and deceit, especially of foreigners, to violence, to the ruination of families through excessive gambling and to sexual depravity. Attempts, as in 1615, were made to prevent courtesans and prostitutes holding ridotti in their houses, or organising gambling. The repetition of legislation and orders for investigation highlight their significance in the social life of Venetian patricians, their bravi and lesser associates. However some ridotti were important meeting places for intellectual discussion, not just for sensual pleasure and the noble mania for gambling. A foreign visitor like John Evelyn could readily secure entry to the San Felice ridotto, as part of Carnival celebrations, before going to the opera. The San Trovaso casino was in the seventeenth century a useful place for political gossip. A Mocenigo father introduced his son to political contacts by financing modest losses. Social gambling was a way of learning etiquette in a republic without a recognised court; and a writer in the 1620– 30s, Antonino Colluraffi, stated that patricians had (unfortunately) to go to the ridotti in order to secure suitable offices.60
The Venetian casino allowed women (of some respectability as well as courtesans) access, with a certain amount of equal competition and involvement by the later seventeenth century. The French ambassador Saint-Didier recorded the presence of noble women in the San Moise casino in the 1670s; but frowned on this as much else as part of the excessive liberty or libertinism of Venetian high society, and love of entertainment. This sort of ‘immoral’ behaviour produced heavier attacks against Italian decadent ‘effeminate’ society in the eighteenth century.
This chapter has indicated that the physical environment of leading Italian cities was well regulated in the early modern period, starting out of hygienic necessity, but increasingly affected and complicated by concerns for social and political control and for propagandist embellishment, public and private. The regulation of urban lives owed much to the guild systems. In many cities the growth of the guilds testified to the diversification of artisan activity as it met the expanded material culture. Through the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries there were many more places for men (and to some extent women) to meet for work, commerce and pleasure. Sometimes political and religious leaders had cause for concern over such social contacts. This chapter has concentrated on physical structures within cities – living areas, places of work and of meeting – and the single most obvious organisation of urban work, the guild. The next chapter will consider other working groups through the social hierarchies, down to the economically most vulnerable workless.