Introduction: Life Between Buildings

Nevola, Fabrizio

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Introduction: Life Between Buildings

Fabrizio Nevola

Street Life in Renaissance Italy

~The Renaissance in Italy is a period that has been studied extensively and from multiple points of view. Following Erwin Panofsky, numerous scholars have pointed out that there are many ‘Renaissances’, which overlap to create a rich picture of one of the best-studied...

Author

Fabrizio Nevola

PublisherYale University Press

Related print edition pages: pp.7-21

Stable URL: https://aaeportal.com/?id=-22179

Chapter subject tags:Architecture, Renaissance--ItalyLorenzetti, Ambrogio, 1285-approximately 1348Urban ecology (Sociology)Public spaces--ItalyMaterial culture--ItalyPalazzo pubblico (Siena, Italy)City and town life--Italy

Introduction: Life Between Buildings

The Renaissance in Italy is a period that has been studied extensively and from multiple points of view. Following Erwin Panofsky, numerous scholars have pointed out that there are many ‘Renaissances’, which overlap to create a rich picture of one of the best-studied periods of the pre-modern European past.1Panofsky, 1944; Panofsky, 1972. Curran, 2014, provides a review of the extensive scholarship around this influential thesis. We know a huge amount about the intellectual figures, the artists, the political events, the major buildings and the significant patrons that brought them into being. The Medici, Machiavelli and Michelangelo are household names, well known to many; cities like Florence and Rome, and their major monuments and artworks, are the goal of millions of tourist journeys every year. The Renaissance, it might seem, no longer holds any secrets.

Surprisingly, however, historians know and have explored remarkably little about the actual spaces and movements that animated life in the public realm in the Renaissance period. Monuments stand proud, fashioned by the genius of architects and the munificence of their patrons; political events (battles, treaties, public punishments, dynastic weddings) are enacted at particular moments in time; discoveries (scientific or geographical) are tightly linked to the identity of individuals. We do, of course, know a great deal about the social and cultural context of the art created in the cities of Renaissance Italy, though all too often these works – housed as they are in museums – are now experienced in ways that are predominantly divorced from those original contexts. As Michael Baxandall famously wrote in the opening line of his influential Painting and Experience, ‘a fifteenth-century painting is the deposit of a social relationship’, and to understand that relationship it is essential to explore not just the interaction between artist and patron, but also how the work that was created operated within the ecosystem for which it was intended.2Baxandall, 1972, p. 1.

Why street life?

Streets and the public spaces of cities were, in the pre-modern era, the primary arena for social encounters and transactions, structuring interpersonal, political, devotional, commercial and everyday interactions. These spaces were consciously shaped – by collective institutional decision-making as well as through private interventions – with the consequence that we should understand the built environment of the street as perhaps the most complex artwork of the period, fashioned by a diversity of actions and executed over quite long periods of time.

Objects, individuals and events are all bound together in an ecosystem of time and place. As is increasingly being shown by scholars, reconnecting this complex system to space and location can offer new insights and open up new questions. It is evident that different ecclesiastical environments were crucial to much of the artistic production of pre-modern eras, and a vast range of scholarship has examined religious art and its wider patronage and contexts. A rather more recent trend, over the past twenty or so years, has seen the emergence and flourishing of a scholarly endeavour applied to the domestic interior, which has benefited from interdisciplinary approaches to the (largely elite) home as a place forged through art, architecture, social practices, individuals, patrons and so forth: here, it is the act of living in the domestic sphere that emerges, with the material culture that was associated with it.3The exhibition that informed the redisplay of the Medieval and Renaissance galleries at the Victoria and Albert Museum was exemplary; see Ajmar-Wollheim and Dennis, 2006. This book aspires to direct a similar attention to the public realm of the world of Italian cities, seeking to reassemble a sense of the material culture of public space, and to fill the gap in historical knowledge of the mundane and the exceptional transactions that took place in cities of the past. Through visible signs and gestures that are often still inscribed in the urban fabric, this study recovers some of the multiple ways in which urban life was played out in cities, ranging from the grand and ceremonial to the prosaic and the everyday.

It is for this reason that the book’s title addresses not just the physical spaces of the ‘street’ but the less tangible essence of the ‘life’ that was played out in those spaces. To that end, the hierarchies of meaning and significance applied throughout this book tend to follow the dictum, well known among contemporary urban designers, of the Danish architect Jan Gehl: ‘First life, then spaces, then buildings – the other way around never works.’4Gehl, 1987, p. 23. In the realm of contemporary urban design, Gehl’s work is best known for the application of the concept of ‘shared space’, a way of managing the streetscape that cancels the primacy of the automobile and redefines the position of the pedestrian – an experiment first introduced in Copenhagen and now replicated widely in cities throughout the world. The title of his 1971 book, published in translation as Life between Buildings, is clear, and underlines the importance of that key area of the city that is all too easily overlooked: the space between all the vertical built structures that make up the urban fabric. Gehl is distinctive for having reversed the primacy of built form in architectural practice, and for attending to the nature of human interactions in the public realm and considering how these can be improved through interventions that alter behaviours and collective experiences.

Moreover, in considering the means by which ‘good quality urban space’ can be achieved, Gehl specifically looks to changes that have transformed the way that cities function and have been inhabited since the Industrial Revolution.5Ibid.; Gehl, 2010. His practice has highlighted a transfer of ‘essential activities’, formerly transacted in the public space of streets (commerce and business, but also common place interactions of various types), to interior spaces, showing that people will now occupy and enjoy public space for ‘optional’ activities only where appropriate quality and amenity are provided. Shared urban environments are created by reducing the dominance of the automobile, designing street furniture and layouts that facilitate pedestrian encounters, and encouraging the establishment of retail and leisure activities that make an active feature of the public spaces of streets. Copenhagen, as well as streets in New York, Sydney, London, Brighton and numerous other cities, attests to the successful implementation of these ideas, while economic indicators and quality-of-life statistics point to the net benefits to be derived from what may seem at first to be disruptive and transformative interventions.6Extensive media coverage of many of these and other examples is collected by Gehl Architects at https://gehlpeople.com/work/cases/.

But what relevance does any of this have to a study of street life in Renaissance Italy? In thinking of the urban realm as an ecosystem, and describing a priority for the people who make up cities at any given moment, Gehl (and various other theorists who will appear at different points in this book) offers us insights into ways of living and understanding urban form that are eminently transferable to different historical epochs. Moreover, while it may seem anachronistic to deny the primacy of the automobile in thinking about life between buildings in the past, the relationships occurring at street level that Gehl discusses are perhaps as old as the practice of urban living itself. Thus, to make something of a bold chronological leap, we might look at Ambrogio Lorenzetti’s fresco The City at Peace (or Good Government in the City, as it is sometimes known), painted in the government chamber, the Sala dei Nove (or Sala della Pace) in the Palazzo Pubblico in Siena at the end of the 1330s (fig. 1).7This cycle has received much attention; see Castelnuovo, 1995; Starn, 1994; see also Nevola, 2007, pp. 5–28, with earlier bibliography. Lorenzetti is not, of course, representing ‘shared space’ in the same terms as are described and theorised by Gehl, but it is hard not to read this image of urban life – and the next, showing rural life – as demonstrating the very same primacy of ‘First life, then spaces, then buildings’.

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Description: The City at Peace (or Good Government in the City) by Lorenzetti, Ambrogio

1. Ambrogio Lorenzetti, The City at Peace (or Good Government in the City), 1338–40, scene from the fresco An Allegory of Good and Bad Government, Sala della Pace, Palazzo Pubblico, Siena.

In the view that unfolds on the wall of the city hall, Lorenzetti places people in the foreground, and it is human activities that animate the scene, within the firm protective frame of buildings that enclose and define the city, from the boundary walls at one edge, through the domestic architecture of the background. In the open space of the foreground, a variety of actions are transacted in public space – a wedding procession on the far left, a group of enigmatic dancing figures towards the centre and the numerous commercial activities that line the street and spill out onto it. Movement is everywhere: a strong linear thrust binds the city to the countryside, as humans and animals trudge in and out of the gates, setting off down the via Francigena, which cuts through the countryside, or making their way along the street or piazza that forms the main focus of the foreground in the city scene. Moreover, we are reminded that the supply chain of the city was dependent upon transportation: horses are prominent throughout the fresco, both as a means of transport for the more affluent elites, shown in the wedding procession or going out hunting, and as pack animals, carrying the goods (wool packs, above all) that fuel the city’s trade and industry.

This is an urban scene where, as Gehl would have it, the majority of ‘essential activities’ are taking place in the public realm. Lorenzetti represents the city’s public face – the aspect that can be seen from the street – and does so by showing the balance between the built environment and the actions of people living in the city. The success of the image is precisely and simply achieved through this balance. That this is how we should understand it is made clear by the fresco’s counterpart on the west wall, which shows the effects of war on the city and countryside. Here the balance is broken, and this is expressed forcefully through the derelict condition of the buildings but also through the nature of the interactions occurring in the public space of the foreground. Crime and disorder rule, and there is a visible martial presence in the persons of the soldiers at the gate and the various officials in the central scene, where an armed militia intervenes in two assaults involving women.

A striking contrast emerges here; in the civic scene of peace there is no visible presence of government authority or policing, while in its opposite these figures predominate. That such a reading is intentional is revealed by the winged figures that appear above the city gates: ‘Securitas’ (safety) above the city at peace, ‘Timor’ (fear) above the city at war. Of course, the key to understanding both city scenes lies in the allegorical arrangement of figures that are associated with them, and, as Quentin Skinner and others have shown, the lynchpin figure in these allegories is that of Justice.8Skinner, 1988; Skinner 1999. Without rehearsing the complex arguments that have raged among the various interpreters of Lorenzetti’s allegories of government, it is clear that where justice reigns, and where citizens contribute to its emplacement, peace is assured. ‘Safety’, as will be shown in Chapter 3, is achieved collectively, and, as such, the need for its policing by officials is not apparent. The opposite is true where ‘fear’ rules, as the conventions of civic cohabitation have collapsed and enforcement is required to stem the tide of violence.

While this summary reading of Lorenzetti’s famous fresco cycle does not differ enormously from those that have come before it, by viewing the scenes from street level, a clear focus on the city as an ecosystem can be shown to emerge. Themes that have been touched upon, and will be explored in greater detail in the chapters that follow, are policing and the regulation of behaviour, trade and the transaction of activities, transport and movement, as well as ritual events such as marriage. All these are carried out and made possible through social interactions and performance in public space. As such, the final point to be underlined here is the inextricably linked nature of people and place in Lorenzetti’s formulation. In this respect, we can view these scenes as capturing the essential ways in which the built form of the city expresses governance. The well-ordered spaces, harmonious buildings and carefully arranged curtains of shop fronts defining the contours of public space (fig. 2) all serve to articulate how the city is shaped by civic decision-making.9A key point of Nevola, 2007, ch. 1; see also Kostof, 1982. For the legislative underpinning of the regime see Elsheikh, 2002. In turn, the groups of figures, whether dancing, trading, learning or manufacturing (fig. 3), provide a human counterpoint to the built physical spaces. These are not merely representations of the everyday transactions of life in the city, they embody how urban life comes into being.

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Description: The City at Peace, the architecture, manipulated version by Lorenzetti, Ambrogio

2. Lorenzetti, The City at Peace, the architecture (manipulated version of fig. 1, by Ross Davidson, with Fabrizio Nevola, redrawn by Luca Brunke).

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Description: The City at Peace, people and their activities, manipulated version by Lorenzetti,...

3. Lorenzetti, The City at Peace, people and their activities (manipulated version of fig. 1, by Ross Davidson, with Fabrizio Nevola, redrawn by Luca Brunke).

It is perhaps simplistic to compare the Palazzo Pubblico frescoes to the equally famous but rather more enigmatic formulations of the ‘ideal city’ depicted in three late-fifteenth-century panels, probably created in Urbino and now dispersed across various museums – views that are notable for the rigorously ordered classicising built environment, almost devoid of human life (fig. 4).10The three panels in question remain at the centre of an attribution debate; for a recent discussion, see Marchi and Valazzi, 2012. The Ideal City panels (the subject of further discussion in the Epilogue) resist interpretation as depictions of lived environments, and instead stand almost to justify a traditional approach to architectural history, which favours monumental built form over the socio-cultural analysis of complex urban ecosystems. By contrast, Lorenzetti’s image – like so many of the paintings discussed elsewhere in this book – is a powerful reminder of the importance of knitting together the disciplinary expertise of urban historians (social and economic) and the architectural studies of buildings and cities to achieve interdisciplinary insights into built form and urban experience.

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4. Unknown central Italian artist, Ideal City, 1480–90(?), tempera on panel, Galleria Nazionale delle Marche, Urbino.

What is street life?

So what do we mean by street life? In essence, the subject of this book is the interaction of people and place, where place is specifically the public realm of an urban character. So then, the subject of the inquiry is the combination of the built environment – the buildings, piazzas and streets that make up the physical fabric – and the social interactions that take place in that environment. In this context, ‘street life’ is a term that serves to conflate place and action in a site-specific and defined way, much as we might identify actions, rituals and material culture associated with the domestic interior or sacred spaces. While religious and domestic spaces have received significant attention from scholars, the public arena of the street, both as a unit of urban space and as a public environment for social interaction, have commanded relatively little attention from scholars.11This section follows Nevola, 2013a, revised for Italian coverage.

Growing interest in street life of the past is partly due to the changing nature of architectural history, which has gradually shifted from a predominance of monographic studies of architects and monuments to a more broadly contextualised approach, setting the architectural ‘object’ in its wider social and cultural context.12Harris, 2015, an approach exemplified in the survey Anderson, 2013. The increasingly interdisciplinary nature of such inquiry has led to fruitful strands of research, such as the scholarship around architecture and liturgy – which has transformed the way that churches are studied in various periods – or that concerning architecture and individual identity formation, which has provided a rich strand for studies of elite domestic architecture. Within the field of urban architectural history – by which I mean studies that cover both the built form and the social history of cities – a similar movement away from the formal analysis of built form and its history to a broader interpretation of contexts and meanings can be identified.13Favro, 1999–2000.

The grand narrative of the history of cities across periods and cultures outlined in two volumes by Spiro Kostof includes an important chapter in The City Assembled on the street as both ‘container and content’, in which the author notes that a history of streets and the interrelation of people and place has yet to be written.14‘The Street’, in Kostof, 1992, pp. 189–244. Echoing Joseph Rykwert’s comment that a ‘street is human movement institutionalized’,15Rykwert, 1978, p. 15. Kostof examines how human use is as powerful in shaping urban form as are formal design strategies that impose grand set pieces on the city fabric. It is this binary process – part design-led and part informal usage – that sets the agenda for considering the public realm as it developed in the past. Indeed, the street has been considered as a unit of urban form, through interdisciplinary analysis that brings to bear a variety of factors, ranging from political to economic, from social to aesthetic, and often taking in the relationship of the ritual functions of the built environment to the people that inhabit it.16Qelik, Favro and Ingersoll, 1994b. Nevertheless, the focus has tended to be on the emergence and development of particular thoroughfares or public spaces, rather than the broader analysis of the public realm and the activity that animated it in the past.

A more recent study switches the focus back to the social aspects of the cultural history of early modern European streets, considering them as the material expression of the dynamics that regulate the boundaries and relationships between public and private, but somewhat overlooking the physicality of their built forms.17Laitinen and Cohen, 2008b. This study places special importance on the meaning of space and how it was used, and helpfully identifies the street as an appropriate unit for questioning the very concept of ‘private’, advancing a more nuanced gradation between public and domestic experiences of space.18For this more nuanced approach, see also, for example, Cohen and Cohen, 2001–2. This distinction between public and private/domestic emerges as an especially rich seam for research that probes the physical and social boundaries located at street level – issues underpinning many of the cases examined in the chapters that follow.

The study of city-based rituals has emerged over the past thirty years as the most productive area relating to how urban spaces were used. A vast and growing literature considers city streets as the stage for processions and other forms of urban ritual, such as triumphal entries, religious festivals, and events marking the life cycle of individuals (marriages, funerals, etc.).19For an overview, see Muir, 1997. Analysis and interpretation of such ceremonial events (which has been very much influenced by works on contemporary ritual and social drama by anthropologists such as Arnold van Gennep and Victor Turner) has tended to follow the leads of Richard Trexler and Edward Muir, whose landmark studies of Florence and Venice, respectively, have provided a benchmark for work in this field throughout Europe.20Muir, 1981; Trexler, 1980.

Certain streets (or, in Venice, canals) were the crucial vectors that channelled collective behaviour and took on the symbolic value of ritual routes. Among these, perhaps the most important of all were the axes that crossed Rome, used for the papal possesso ceremony, in which the newly installed pope traversed the city from the Vatican to the Lateran and symbolically took ownership of his diocese through a carefully orchestrated ritual.21See essays in Fagiolo, 1997a; Ingersoll, 1985, pp. 171–223. As Muir has shown, the way in which urban processions of various sorts – whether regularly occurring religious ceremonies or extraordinary events such as the entries of monarchs – repeatedly utilised the same routes has been seen as a sign of unified urban image, projected ephemerally by ceremonies, and in permanent form by the built fabric along such routes. Urban rituals were a key way in which power relations were encoded, and in which fealty was declared and made manifest, both in courtly and civic settings. Streets thus came to be a permanent and visual extension of the ephemeral events that they articulated, as is discussed further in Chapter 1.

Equally, however, such urban rituals and the unity they enshrined have been understood to reveal the frictions and fractures between communities and groups within the city.22For significant examples from Germany of ritual and conflict, see Arlinghaus, 2010; Zika, 1988. Again, in the papal possesso, conflict between the papacy and the local nobility, as well as the population of Rome, was articulated by moments of ritual conflict, which on occasion flared up into violent encounters.23Ginzburg, 1987; Nussdorfer, 1987. Inclusion or exclusion, participation in or absence from events had powerful political repercussions, and streets could permanently articulate these effects: for example, by the formation of exclusive palace streets – a phenomenon that became increasingly widespread from the sixteenth century, as the well-known example of the strada Nuova in Genoa (explored in more detail in Chapter 4) shows.24Gorse, 1997.

Following the study of ritual uses of urban spaces in staged processional events, some interest has been directed to the more ordinary practices of urban life in the past.25For instance, Clarke and Nevola, 2013b, pp. 47–55, and essays. This shift towards the analysis of everyday uses of urban space owes much to the work of Michel de Certeau and Henri Lefebvre on the social production of space and spatial practices, which strongly underpins the present study.26De Certeau, 1984; Lefebvre, 1991. This concern for social interactions located in their physical contexts, combined in varying degrees, has contributed to defining what the cultural geographer Denis Cosgrove described as a ‘spatial turn’ in historical research.27Cosgrove, 2004; Weigel, 2009, uses the term ‘topographical turn’. Within such a methodological framework, the street emerges as a prime performative urban space, on which individual and collective actions and behaviours inscribe meaning that accumulates over time. Some years ago, Trexler commented that ‘Social spaces are central to the formation, expression, and modification of individual and group identities.’28Trexler, 1985, p. 4. Streets are just such social spaces, and street life is everyday and ritualised, its meanings deposited on the urban fabric through repetitive usage as well as exceptional breaks from the norm.

Outside such ritual use, however, discussions of streets have tended to be divided between the analysis of their built characteristics by architectural historians, and the life occurring on and around them by predominantly social or urban historians. While Riita Laitinen and Thomas Cohen state the intention of underlining the ‘nature of the street as an urban material entity’, their volume engages only partially with the visual form of the streets examined.29Laitinen and Cohen, 2008a, p. 197. In fact, the material, visual, tangible and lasting nature of streets is peculiarly lacking in many studies, including a recent work on twentieth-century street life, which is nevertheless significant for throwing light on everyday and marginal areas of life in the city.30Jerram, 2011. Similarly, Elizabeth and Thomas Cohen’s valuable and readable Daily Life in Renaissance Italy offers a richly evocative picture of the varieties of urban experience, while providing only a rather limited physical context for it.31‘Spaces’, in Cohen and Cohen, 2001, pp. 147–62; see also Bell, 2013.

Conversely, studies of the streetscape in seventeenth-century painting have tended to explain the genre of street views, or vedute, in terms of phenomena such as the Grand Tour and the circulation of images of modernity in the cities of continental Europe, rather than engaging specifically with the actions and behaviours represented in the genre.32Blumin, 2008; see also Dubbini, 2002. This is something of a missed opportunity, as such images are filled with a variety of urban life that deserves further investigation. Thus, a growing interest in seventeenth-century urban scenes and characters has emerged, as in the work of Melissa Calaresu on street sellers in early modern Naples, where the painted record (however stylised) serves to capture something of the texture of life in the city, and some of the specialist activities – of ice-cream salesmen, for example – that proliferated there.33Most recently, Calaresu, 2013; Calaresu and van den Heuvel, 2016. Here, the genre piece provides helpful clues for reassembling elements of everyday life that have all too often been overlooked in the scholarship.

Related to painting and the depiction in it of the urban realm, is the field of urban cartography, a science that was fast developing in accuracy during the later fifteenth century.34Ballon and Friedman, 2007; Miller, 2003. While, of course, accurate maps are a valuable tool for the historian who wishes to put the details of social life in cities back into their contemporary settings, it is important to note that maps did not then serve the same purpose as they do today in the navigation of the urban realm by users. As Leonardo’s famous map of Imola shows, and the complex iconographic interpretations of the map of Florence ‘with a chain’ (the ‘Catena’ map of Florence; see fig. 103) confirms, strategic, political or allegorical motives prevailed.35Friedman, 2001. This being so, it is perhaps not surprising to find that little attention has been paid to the detailed depiction of urban settings in the search for the wider meanings that may have underpinned mapping innovations. Nonetheless, as will emerge in Chapter 4, city maps produced during the later fifteenth century and through the sixteenth provide an invaluable resource, not only for understanding the urban layout but also for identifying nodal locations such as street corners and informal piazzas that animated the cities of the past.

The foregoing comments have suggested that social historians of the city tend to overlook the fine-grained detail of the urban fabric of the city, while art or architectural historians may do the opposite, omitting from their studies the subtle social significance of actions and behaviours represented in an urban setting. This is to exaggerate the polarisation of disciplinary boundaries; interdisciplinary approaches are increasingly practised and, as Diane Favro argued at the turn of this century, the bringing together of the spatial, material and social qualities of city streets can bear rich rewards.36Favro, 1999–2000, pp. 364–73. A pre-eminent example is provided by studies of early modern Rome, which have revealed the far from casual meanings associated with urban space, its ownership, and the conflicts that emerged on and around public streets.37Connors, 1989; Nussdorfer, 1997; Tafuri, 1992. The work of Manfredo Tafuri is exemplary in this regard, and has revealed the range and scale of urban interventions and their meaning, from the creation of new streets that imposed hegemonic authority on the cityscape to more subtle modifications that articulated the realignment of power relations in the city.38Tafuri, 1984b. Tafuri’s studies of Rome, Venice and Florence tend to focus on major patrons, even where a micro-historical approach is adopted, as with his study of the church of San Francesco della Vigna in Venice.39Ibid.; see also Foscari and Tafuri, 1983. However, since the subjects of such studies of urbanism are predominantly ruling elites, the scale and nature of the interventions discussed tends to privilege ritual use of the streets as an expression of large-scale patronage and propaganda, quite distinct from the more ordinary city functions that pertain to the interactions of resident communities and groups.

A useful contrast is offered by studies that focus on non-elite functions of urban space and streets, and it is here that truly innovative subjects for research have emerged in recent years. The ‘fertile spaces’ of street life in early modern Europe, described in an important article by Peter Arnade, Martha C. Howell and Walter Simons, are located on the boundaries between public and domestic space.40Arnade, Howell and Simons, 2002. The authors’ subjects are not princes: instead, they focus on individuals and groups whose existence was interstitial, defined by the physical spaces that mediate between public realm and domestic space, and the social interactions that are encouraged by such liminal situations. From these ‘fertile spaces’, an especially fruitful line of enquiry has emerged around the physical place of shops and the practice of shopping, an activity that was largely conducted in the public space of streets and squares.41Calabi, 2004; Welch, 2005. While the history of shopping has a growing scholarship of its own, and is examined further in Chapters 4 and 6, specific sorts of shops have attracted scholarly attention as semi-public places, which facilitated particular forms of dynamic social interaction. Thus, for example, pharmacies or apothecaries’ shops have been the subject of a number of studies, which have shown them as places where medical information as well as neighbourhood gossip circulated freely.42Cavallo and Gentilcore, 2008b; Shaw and Welch, 2011. The more specialist print shop has also been discussed in these terms. The nature of shops, the transactions facilitated by them and the locations that they occupied in the city reveal the value of considering social, spatial and architectural aspects in combination. Much the same can be said for taverns, although the Italian osterie have been scantily studied, particularly when compared to the growing scholarship on the equivalent north of the Alps.43A recent article on Italy is Rosenthal, 2015b. Scholarship on northern Europe is much more extensive; see Brennan, 2011; Kümin, 2007; Kümin and Tlusty, 2002. What this research shows is that taverns were important junctions in normal social interaction, communication and identity formation for men of all classes, as well as hubs of community for more specific, usually lower-class, groups. They were also contested spaces, around which broader conflicts turned, owing to both a real and an imagined association with everyday violence, prostitution, sodomy and gambling, and sometimes with political or religious subversion.

The tavern and the pharmacy were socially and symbolically significant places, which provided a physical expression and location for social practices and behaviours that are central to defining concepts of street life. To this day, the word ‘street’ is often a negative qualifier in conjunction with other terms, and it is noticeable that similar judgements pertain when applied to the historical past: crime and deviant behaviour are commonly associated with streets and public spaces in the city. One obvious example, which has received attention across most European contexts and for a number of Italian cities, is prostitution, though the spatial dimensions of this profession have been subjected to scrutiny by only a few scholars.44Discussed in Chapter 3, with particular reference to the work of Diane Ghirardo, Nicholas Terpstra and Tessa Storey. Streets, taverns and bath-houses were closely associated with prostitution, and the policing of this activity was increasingly street specific, as is discussed in Chapter 3.

The street was also the privileged site for the performance of collective and individual acts and rituals of violence and justice. We may well question Michel Foucault’s famously neat break between the performative, violent justice of the Middle Ages and the subtle surveillance of the Enlightenment state, but it is nonetheless evident that the public space of cities was integral to the processes of justice.45Foucault, 1977. Processions regularly formed along the routes leading the condemned to the site of execution, and confraternities were established to orchestrate rituals and bring succour to those about to die, while crowds gathered to watch the spectacle.46Terpstra, 2008a. Conversely, the street might be the chosen site for particular crimes, such as honour killings, for which the public character of the space and the performative nature of the acts made the street an appropriate setting.47For example, Hunt, 2014. Other factors, such as neighbourhood rivalries and conflicts, as well as the assertion of masculinity, could be articulated in the ritual battles that animated the cities of the Renaissance. The physical borderlines between groups regularly coincided with streets (in much the same way as regional boundaries often do with watercourses), and the streets themselves became the site for the ritual renegotiation of those borders, as did the bridges of Venice, where especially colourful fistfights took place between members of rival factions.48Davis, 1994.

While the street was a favoured setting for crime and violence, in some recent scholarship it has also come to be seen as an alternative locus for finding and defining the early modern public sphere.49Rospocher, 2012; Wilson and Yachnin, 2010. So, for example, Filippo de Vivo has shown that various public spaces in Venice were key communication hubs, which mediated and favoured the transfer of information in printed and oral form.50De Vivo, 2007. Such interpretations push back the well-known identification of the public sphere by Jürgen Habermas, who saw the coffee-houses of the eighteenth century as the first sites where knowledge and ideas were shared outside the control of governing structures.51Habermas, 1999. As spatial questions are raised in relation to social interactions in public places, so a broader picture is emerging about participation in political discourse. In Italy, it was sites such as street corners and piazzas that were favoured by street singers, storytellers and news pamphleteers: the enormous diffusion of cheap print from the early sixteenth century was fuelled by the sale and performance of those texts in public spaces.52Rospocher and Salzberg, 2012b; Salzberg, 2014; for a discussion of bandi posted in Rome, see San Juan, 2001. The circulation of early modern news was transacted through these public-space hubs; similarly, the publication of laws by heralds and town criers and their calls for the prosecution of crimes also occurred at designated sites, such as street corners and marketplaces.53For example, see de Vivo, 2007; Dooley, 2010. Thus, as will be shown in Chapter 5, in areas such as these, as well as the more structured venues of taverns, apothecaries’ and other shops, certain political functions of public space created a culture of conversation that widened participation in political discourse.

This view of the emerging public sphere builds on interactions that were intrinsic to the marketplace as a space of commerce and the exchange of knowledge and of goods.54Various scholars have extended backwards the Habermasian chronology of the public sphere; see Symes, 2010; Vanhaelen and Ward, 2013. Moreover, public space was, of course, crucial in asserting, challenging and negotiating issues of gender, class and identity, and it is these aspects of street life that have received most attention in recent scholarly literature.55Brown and Davis, 1998; literature review in Nevola and Rosenthal, 2011. While urban streets were undoubtedly a prevalently male space, as Elizabeth Cohen has recently noted, it is important to progress beyond the male/female–public/private dichotomy, as there remains an ‘unworkable gap between an ideal of protective, and constraining, enclosure and the realities of most women’s lives’.56Cohen, 2008, p. 294. That the street was a place where this ‘gap’ played out in the practices and behaviours of elite and non-elite women is explored further here, though the complexities of how urban public space was used and shaped by issues of gender deserve significant further study. It is increasingly clear that working women, ranging from prostitutes to washerwomen, street hawkers to orphans begging for alms, populated the streets to a far greater degree than did women from the urban elites, especially those who were unmarried.57On prostitutes, see Chapter 3; for elites, see some examples in Chapter 6. See also Calaresu and van den Heuvel, 2016; Rinne, 2001–2; Terpstra, 2010; Tomas, 2006; Welch, 2005.

Finally, in this opening survey of the research and approaches that can help to clarify the present object of study, we should consider the sensory environment of the city, and the emerging theme in historical work of the ‘other’ senses, which have all too often been eclipsed by the predominance of attention to the visual.58Cowan and Steward, 2006. A series of studies, in part following the ground-breaking research into the aural sensorium by R. Murray Schafer, have begun to reveal the rich soundscapes of the past.59Schafer, 1994; see also Garrioch, 2003; Strohm, 1985. Writing about early modern England, Bruce R. Smith has commented on the remarkable complexity of the sonic environment, which was distinguished by the ‘number of overlapping, shifting, acoustic communities, centred on different soundmarks: parish bells, the speech of different nationalities, the sounds of trades, open-air markets, the noises of public gathering places’.60Smith, 1999, pp. 55–6. The soundscape of Renaissance Italian cities still largely remains to be understood. Following the important work on bells by Alain Corbin, various scholars are beginning to show how music and sound spread out well beyond the bounds of domestic and ecclesiastical spaces of performance, so that public spaces and streets were animated by sounds, many of which bore significant social and political meanings.61The key work here is Corbin, 1994. See also Atkinson, 2016b; Knighton and Mazuela-Anguita, 2018.

As Chapter 2 suggests, streets were noisy, and they were often also dirty and smelly; and so the odours of the street and public health have also received some recent attention. The nineteenth-century preoccupation with segregating sewage and filth from the streets established the idea of paving as a means of separating users of the street from the ordure beneath the ground in the sewers; here again – as with the introduction of lighting or the end of the theatre of justice – modernity is heralded by the sanitisation of the street environment.62Corbin, 1986. Smell (or stench), like sound, was not confined by the walls of buildings, but permeated through them, so that during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries zoning and street-hygiene legislation recognised the widespread benefits to decorum of marginalising certain trades and activities away from central streets.63For instance, Biow, 2006; Henderson, 2010. In addition to human waste, the animal waste produced by growing numbers of coaches in many early modern cities must have affected the streets in ways that researchers have barely yet explored.64For instance, Hunt, 2014; Jenner, 2000; Long, 2018, pp. 43–62.

Novel areas for research, such as urban transportation and the way this shapes and alters the city environment, become more evident from an approach to street life that views the city as an ecosystem. As noted above, the fertile spaces for new research in this area arise from interstitial locations or mediating figures that are the product of the vibrant life of streets. Interpretation of such locations requires an interdisciplinary research stance that views the street as a unit for a broader spatial (in the Lefebvrian sense) understanding of the social and material culture of the early modern public realm.

So then, what is street life? How can we find it in the early modern city? And what areas might reward further inquiry? From this brief review of approaches and materials, the street can helpfully be understood as an ecosystem, influenced by multiple factors in its form, the way it was used and how it was perceived. As has been suggested, street life as an area of study specifically sets out to cross between the physical and the social fabrics of the city and to reveal the nature and degree of interdependence of one upon the other. While the street might be used for ephemeral displays of hegemonic power, it was also a space of the everyday, and as such provides a rich context for research into overlooked people, places and practices. By opening up such a vast canvas of urban life to observation, we run the risk of finding street life everywhere and nowhere, of its slipping away as easily as market stalls are packed up at the end of a day’s trading. The challenge of the study of street life is to capture such daily, ephemeral practices, and to anchor them within the fabric of the social, political and cultural history of early modern cities.

The chapters that follow have been written to address particular aspects of how urban life was structured around the physical spaces of streets and squares: the public realm. Each chapter opens with a paradigmatic example, chosen to give a sense of the rich layering of meanings that can be found in actions and behaviours played out in these spaces. From these individual examples – or microstudies – of place, the analysis of particular themes spreads outwards to draw in a discussion of comparative evidence from cities across Italy.

While there are clearly significant challenges in attempting a coverage of the whole Italian peninsula in such a well-researched period, I have preferred to adopt a comparative approach that seeks to draw out commonalities in practices, rather than to focus on the unique nature of only one urban centre. Having researched and written extensively on a single city – Siena – I am aware of the great advantages to be gained from a tight focus, but in this study my aim is to open up a new field or approach, by proposing ways in which we can read and analyse spaces and behaviours that I hope will be explored in greater detail by others in future research. There will, of course, be failings and short comings, but the comparative approach has the value of enabling some degree of measurement or assessment of the relative significance of examples that apply across multiple centres, or are restricted to particular cities or regions.

The book is ordered in two parts; Part 1 considers the city as a whole, while Part 2 focuses on specific built elements at a more circumscribed scale. In parallel with this organising principle, and complementing it, a changing perspective moves from the dominant authority of the imposed order of planners and rulers to the fine-grained and more complex everyday interactions shaped at street level. As the introduction to Part 1 argues, this approach consciously adopts Michel de Certeau’s influential concept of ‘practiced space’.65De Certeau, 1984, pp. 92–3.

The three chapters that make up Part 1 broadly consider the overarching issue of urban development through design and infrastructure as expressions of socio-political systems, though a recurring theme is the resistance and adaptation of everyday life to centralising order. The principal focus of Chapter 1 is the emergence of planned, urban-scale renewal, directed at the development of new streets during the fifteenth century, and the means by which these increasingly uniform urban set pieces articulated and framed the authority of dominant elites. Chapter 2 flips the focus to consider how urban public space structured everyday interactions and movement in the city; here, we consider the lived experience and sensory environment of streets, new and old. Finally, in Chapter 3, the framing concept of surveillance is adopted, to help us consider how streets can be understood as a technology of authority and control; again however, while it is shown that urbanism clearly articulated centralised power, it is also suggested that the policing and control of urban public space were often participatory and collective, and relied on ‘eyes on the street’.66See Jacobs, 1961, pp. 29ff.; discussed further in Chapters 3 and 5.

Part 2 moves from the collective, urban-scale discussion of streets as structuring elements of urban design and experience to consider more tightly focused architectural elements within urban space, and the meanings inscribed upon them through the social practices of daily life. Adopting a framework set out by the influential urban design theorist Kevin Lynch in his Image of the City, the three chapters focus on three broad elements of ‘imageability’ through a discussion of paths and edges, then nodes and, in the final chapter, monuments.67Lynch, 1960, pp. 9–13, on ‘imageability’; pp. 46ff. on elements of city form. Part 2 advances an analysis in which attention focuses firmly on the social interactions enabled and given meaning by elements of the city fabric, to propose the agency of those sites through the patterns of meaning inscribed upon them by their use.

So then, Chapter 4 serves as a counterpoint to Part 1 by revisiting the street through a focused consideration of how the Renaissance interest in street planning and renewal played out in the architectural and social specialisation of building types and of activities revolving around them; it is noted that the process was far more gradual than is often proposed, and that mixed-use conditions prevailed through much of the sixteenth century. Chapter 5 adopts a much more circumscribed point of observation – the street corner – and considers how artistic and architectural markers accentuated these nodal sites to emphasise their importance in localised interactions. In the final chapter, the discussion turns to perhaps the archetypal architectural innovation of the Renaissance, the residential domestic palace; here, in contrast to predominant approaches to all’antica architecture, the discussion centres on understanding this typology through a close examination of how the palace’s features structured specific behaviours and interactions between the public and domestic sphere. The Epilogue turns briefly to a distinct, yet closely related element of urban public space – the piazza, or square – and surveys this in the light of the preceding discussion, proposing that we should understand these increasingly tightly planned set pieces of urban design through the prism of socially mediated practices.

This book argues that built form and social practices should be understood to operate in concert with one another; it is this interaction – the inscribing of meanings through actions on place – that underpins Lefebvre’s influential understanding and definition of space. Lefebvre’s observation regarding the ‘social character of space’, is that ‘space is a [social] product [. . .] space thus produced also serves as a tool of thought and of action [. . .] in addition to being a means of production it is also a means of control, and hence of domination, of power’.68Lefebvre, 1991, p. 27. Having something in common with Baxandall’s description of a painting as resulting from a social relationship, Lefebvre’s approach provides a framework for the analysis of the meanings of urban public space considered here. As we probe these meanings, so the public spaces of Italian cities will emerge as dynamic structures that shaped behaviours while also forming the setting or backdrop for them; the street emerges as a carefully assembled complex structure, whose physical, visual and sensory character carried quite specific meanings. It is proposed that urban public space was a socially mediated space, where meanings were fashioned in a dialectic between everyday actions and centralised authorities. The chapters that follow consider the spatial practices inscribed on the streets and public spaces of Renaissance Italy, in order better to reveal the dynamics at play in the ordering – representation – of the built environment and the lived – representational – experiences of its inhabitants.69Ibid., pp. 38–9, for the key passage that articulates the distinction between the imposed order of ruling elites (‘representation of space’) and the ‘representational space’ of everyday lived experience.

Here and throughout, translations from Italian are author’s own, unless otherwise indicated.

1 Panofsky, 1944; Panofsky, 1972. Curran, 2014, provides a review of the extensive scholarship around this influential thesis. »

2 Baxandall, 1972, p. 1. »

3 The exhibition that informed the redisplay of the Medieval and Renaissance galleries at the Victoria and Albert Museum was exemplary; see Ajmar-Wollheim and Dennis, 2006. »

4 Gehl, 1987, p. 23. »

5 Ibid.; Gehl, 2010. »

6 Extensive media coverage of many of these and other examples is collected by Gehl Architects at https://gehlpeople.com/work/cases/. »

7 This cycle has received much attention; see Castelnuovo, 1995; Starn, 1994; see also Nevola, 2007, pp. 5–28, with earlier bibliography. »

8 Skinner, 1988; Skinner 1999. »

9 A key point of Nevola, 2007, ch. 1; see also Kostof, 1982. For the legislative underpinning of the regime see Elsheikh, 2002. »

10 The three panels in question remain at the centre of an attribution debate; for a recent discussion, see Marchi and Valazzi, 2012. »

11 This section follows Nevola, 2013a, revised for Italian coverage. »

12 Harris, 2015, an approach exemplified in the survey Anderson, 2013. »

13 Favro, 1999–2000. »

14 ‘The Street’, in Kostof, 1992, pp. 189–244. »

15 Rykwert, 1978, p. 15. »

16 Qelik, Favro and Ingersoll, 1994b. »

17 Laitinen and Cohen, 2008b. »

18 For this more nuanced approach, see also, for example, Cohen and Cohen, 2001–2. »

19 For an overview, see Muir, 1997. »

20 Muir, 1981; Trexler, 1980. »

21 See essays in Fagiolo, 1997a; Ingersoll, 1985, pp. 171–223. »

22 For significant examples from Germany of ritual and conflict, see Arlinghaus, 2010; Zika, 1988. »

23 Ginzburg, 1987; Nussdorfer, 1987. »

24 Gorse, 1997. »

25 For instance, Clarke and Nevola, 2013b, pp. 47–55, and essays. »

26 De Certeau, 1984; Lefebvre, 1991. »

27 Cosgrove, 2004; Weigel, 2009, uses the term ‘topographical turn’. »

28 Trexler, 1985, p. 4. »

29 Laitinen and Cohen, 2008a, p. 197. »

30 Jerram, 2011. »

31 ‘Spaces’, in Cohen and Cohen, 2001, pp. 147–62; see also Bell, 2013. »

32 Blumin, 2008; see also Dubbini, 2002. »

33 Most recently, Calaresu, 2013; Calaresu and van den Heuvel, 2016. »

34 Ballon and Friedman, 2007; Miller, 2003. »

35 Friedman, 2001. »

36 Favro, 1999–2000, pp. 364–73. »

37 Connors, 1989; Nussdorfer, 1997; Tafuri, 1992. »

38 Tafuri, 1984b. »

39 Ibid.; see also Foscari and Tafuri, 1983. »

40 Arnade, Howell and Simons, 2002. »

41 Calabi, 2004; Welch, 2005. »

42 Cavallo and Gentilcore, 2008b; Shaw and Welch, 2011. The more specialist print shop has also been discussed in these terms. »

43 A recent article on Italy is Rosenthal, 2015b. Scholarship on northern Europe is much more extensive; see Brennan, 2011; Kümin, 2007; Kümin and Tlusty, 2002. »

44 Discussed in Chapter 3, with particular reference to the work of Diane Ghirardo, Nicholas Terpstra and Tessa Storey. »

45 Foucault, 1977. »

46 Terpstra, 2008a. »

47 For example, Hunt, 2014. »

48 Davis, 1994. »

49 Rospocher, 2012; Wilson and Yachnin, 2010. »

50 De Vivo, 2007. »

51 Habermas, 1999. »

52 Rospocher and Salzberg, 2012b; Salzberg, 2014; for a discussion of bandi posted in Rome, see San Juan, 2001. »

53 For example, see de Vivo, 2007; Dooley, 2010. »

54 Various scholars have extended backwards the Habermasian chronology of the public sphere; see Symes, 2010; Vanhaelen and Ward, 2013. »

55 Brown and Davis, 1998; literature review in Nevola and Rosenthal, 2011. »

56 Cohen, 2008, p. 294. »

57 On prostitutes, see Chapter 3; for elites, see some examples in Chapter 6. See also Calaresu and van den Heuvel, 2016; Rinne, 2001–2; Terpstra, 2010; Tomas, 2006; Welch, 2005. »

58 Cowan and Steward, 2006. »

59 Schafer, 1994; see also Garrioch, 2003; Strohm, 1985. »

60 Smith, 1999, pp. 55–6. »

61 The key work here is Corbin, 1994. See also Atkinson, 2016b; Knighton and Mazuela-Anguita, 2018. »

62 Corbin, 1986. »

63 For instance, Biow, 2006; Henderson, 2010. »

64 For instance, Hunt, 2014; Jenner, 2000; Long, 2018, pp. 43–62. »

65 De Certeau, 1984, pp. 92–3. »

66 See Jacobs, 1961, pp. 29ff.; discussed further in Chapters 3 and 5. »

67 Lynch, 1960, pp. 9–13, on ‘imageability’; pp. 46ff. on elements of city form. »

68 Lefebvre, 1991, p. 27. »

69 Ibid., pp. 38–9, for the key passage that articulates the distinction between the imposed order of ruling elites (‘representation of space’) and the ‘representational space’ of everyday lived experience. »

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