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Part 1: Street Life and Street Cultures
Fabrizio Nevola
Description: Street Life in Renaissance Italy
Street Life in Renaissance Italy
Masuccio Salernitano’s Novellino is a collection of fifty short stories (broadly imitative of Boccaccio’s Decameron), first published in Naples in the last quarter of the fifteenth century.Brand and Pertile, 1996, pp. 153–4.~ In novella...
Author
Fabrizio Nevola
PublisherYale University Press
Copyright© 2020 Fabrizio Nevola
Related print edition pages: pp.22-27
Stable URL: https://aaeportal.com/?id=-22180
Chapter subject tags:Architecture, Renaissance--ItalyUrban ecology (Sociology)City planning--Italy--HistoryPublic spaces--ItalyCity and town life--ItalyPictorial maps, RenaissanceUrban renewal--Italy
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Part 1: Street Life and Street Cultures
Messere Floriano da Castel San Piero was, in his time, a famous and well-known lawyer in Bologna. He came out of church one day in the company of a number of other lawyers, and they made their way to the main square; here they came to the shop of a silversmith [at the sign of the Bear], where Floriano had had a precious and beautiful gilded silver goblet made. They stopped there while he settled the bill with the silversmith; Floriano looked around him to find his page boy, who wasn’t there, so he asked the silversmith to have his apprentice take the goblet back to his house, which he was happy to do. Just at that time two young men from Rome – of the Treio district – had arrived in Bologna; they travelled the length of Italy gambling with false coins and dice as well as a host of other tricks, to con people, eating and making merry at the expense of the Crucifix (which they swore by). Their names were Liello de Cecco and Andreuccio from Vallemontone; by chance they were on the piazza when Master Floriano had sent the goblet home, and having seen it they decided to set to work to get hold of it.1Salernitano, 1940, pp. 166–7.
Masuccio Salernitano’s Novellino is a collection of fifty short stories (broadly imitative of Boccaccio’s Decameron), first published in Naples in the last quarter of the fifteenth century.2Brand and Pertile, 1996, pp. 153–4. In novella XVII, Masuccio tells a story about Messere Floriano da Castel San Piero, a man famous in Bologna in his day as a lawyer. The tale is a classic beffa – a prank – played on the unsuspecting and perhaps rather self-important lawyer by a couple of tricksters from Rome. Liello and Andreuccio looked on while Floriano paid for his goblet in the main square, and sent it home; they went to a tavern, bought a fish and went with it to Floriano’s house, where they knocked on the door and spoke with Floriano’s wife, telling her to prepare a delicious banquet, as her husband would be coming home with some colleagues. They also asked for the goblet that the shop boy from the Orso had just brought, as Floriano had questioned the scales used to weigh the goblet and wanted to recalculate the price.
The rest is fairly predictable. The conmen took the goblet to a safe place just outside the city at the monastery of San Michele in Bosco, where the Roman prior was their friendly fence. Floriano came home, was amazed at the lavish lunch that had been prepared, and asked his wife what was going on, and so the beffa unfolded, with the goblet lost and a banquet wasted. Unsurprisingly, Floriano was furious, and rushed back to the central square to find out if anyone had seen someone with a big fish walking towards his house. Unbeknownst to Floriano, when he reached the piazza he was seen by Andreuccio, who was ‘standing like an honest man on the corner of the piazza’.3Salernitano, 1940, p. 169. Andreuccio saw his chance to do more damage, and doubled back to the house, where he told the unsuspecting wife that the goblet had been found and Floriano required the fish so as to hold an impromptu celebration in town. Again, the rest is obvious: Floriano lost both goblet and fish, and the tricksters cleaned up.
Like so many novellas, Masuccio’s story of the law professor Floriano da Castel San Piero provides a series of insights into the range of interactions that took place in public space, and the ways in which people and objects moved in and between the public and private spheres. Floriano is a lawyer. He has a public persona, reinforced in the story by his being in the company of other lawyers – a persona that is performed in public as Floriano moves with his colleagues between the church and the piazza. He shops in public, and there is a real sense that the act of shopping in the company of his peers, and in the unquestionably high-end context of a silversmith’s shop at the sign of the bear (Orso), is also a way of articulating his status within the urban community. The performance is not, however, played to a uniquely local crowd, as the piazza is also a space in which strangers in town might be watching; so we are introduced to two conmen from Rome, who specialise in dice and coin tricks, and travel around Italy making their living at the expense of locals who don’t know any better. While working the piazza, they are able to observe Floriano’s transaction at the silversmith’s shop, and (the novella tells us) they are well enough acquainted with the local topography to know where the ostentatious lawyer lives. Without wasting time, they stop in a tavern – the archetypal venue favoured by cardsharps and tricksters – to buy the fish that they need to stage their swindle. The success of their scheme is made possible by the fact that Floriano’s wife – presumably unacquainted with the staff of the silversmith’s shop and the tavern – unquestioningly yields the silver goblet to the fraudsters and sets about preparing the banquet commanded by her husband.
Floriano’s attempt to catch the culprit also centres on public space, as he seeks witnesses to the events in and around the piazza, while Andreuccio in turn mimics ‘honourable’ behaviour by casually hanging around on a street corner in the city’s main public space. Throughout the short novella, bodies, behaviours and places are intimately connected, and reveal transactions occurring on the thresholds between public and private spaces – churches, shops, taverns and even houses – and performed in the public space of Bologna’s central piazza and streets. Indeed, the story also illustrates a variety of conditions of visibility in the city, ranging from the public stage of the piazza, to the more remote neighbourhood where Floriano lives, and beyond the city walls to the extra-urban monastery, to which the stolen goblet is removed for safe-keeping. While it is a work of fiction, the novella is a reminder of how important site and setting are for the meaning of everyday events played out in urban environments, and it leads us to question how public spaces and built architecture shaped and framed behaviours in the early modern city.
The perspective offered by Masuccio’s narrative is firmly rooted in place, albeit there is little topographical detail; the story offers a plausible scenario, as characters and setting interact in ways that are contingent on the reality of social encounters in the urban spaces of the fifteenth century.4Martines, 1994; for the wider context of reading such stories as historical sources, see Martines, 2001, pp. 199–231. Although, to some extent, the dramatis personae are stock characters, Floriano makes sense as a lawyer in a city famed for being the principal centre for legal studies in Europe, while the tricksters perhaps benefited from the invisibility afforded by a university town with its population of itinerant students.5From an extensive literature, see Grendler, 1999. Stories of this sort provide a rich body of evidence for recovering the texture of everyday life in the Renaissance city, offering a viewpoint altogether distinct from that of the majority of contemporary pictorial representations of the city. The latter arose from quite different priorities and functions, as the depiction of the city generally tended to serve to connect the viewer to a particular place.
Thus, for example, in Bologna, the young Michelangelo’s sculpture of St Petronius in the church of San Domenico depicts the saint carrying a model of the city in his hands, a formula that was relatively common for urban patron saints throughout the fifteenth century (fig. 5).6For a discussion of the ritual function of such imagery, see Camelliti, 2010; Davies, 2007. Discussed further in Chapter 5. The primary function of the urban portrait here is to make manifest the intercessory role of the saint on behalf of the polity; the city model instantiates the relationship between the polity and its advocate with the divine. More topographically accurate views of the city appear from the later fifteenth century in institutional commissions, such as Francesco Francia’s fresco, Madonna of the Earthquake, painted in the Palazzo Comunale in 1505 (fig. 6), or Guido Reni’s 1616 altarpiece for Santa Maria della Pietá, commissioned by the senate of Bologna.7For Francia, see the discussion of earthquake rituals in Chapter 2; see also Negro and Roio, 1998, pp. 81, 157–8; Nevola, 2014, pp. 105–7; Williamson, 1907, pp. 88–90. For Reni’s high altarpiece, see Pepper, 1991. The political significance of the urban scene in the background of Ercole de’ Roberti’s twin portrait of Giovanni II and Ginevra Bentivoglio (National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.) has been noted in Clarke, 1999, pp. 403–5. In each of these paintings, the city of Bologna is depicted beneath its divine intercessor; these urban portraits capture the city in its entirety, encircled by walls, with secular and religious monuments prominently visible. Here too, the circumscribed spatial realm of the city is placed in direct relation to the protective agency of the divine power depicted above it.8For a discussion of how such imagery elaborated the pictorial convention of the Madonna of Mercy, see Marshall, 1994, pp. 506ff.; see also Nevola, 2015.
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Description: St Petronius carrying a model of the city of Florence in his hands by Buonarroti,...
5. Michelangelo Buonarroti, St Petronius carrying a model of the city of Florence in his hands, church of San Domenico, Bologna.
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Description: Madonna of the Earthquake by Francia, Francesco
6. Francesco Raibolini, known as ‘il Francia’, Madonna of the Earthquake, 1505, fresco, Palazzo Comunale, Bologna.
Such depictions, which abound for many cities throughout Italy, were intended precisely to be recognisable, so as to reinforce the mediatory function of patrons and intercessors on behalf of the polity; they depict the urban collective, and not the minutiae of urban life at a granular level. Street scenes and depictions of urban life were rare before the seventeenth century;9Examples and details of paintings that capture elements of daily life in the early modern city are discussed in Chapter 5. For the wider context of street scenes, see Jordan Gschwend and Lowe, 2015, pp. 21–2; see also Blumin, 2008, p. 19; Dubbini, 2002. instead, as has been widely noted, the city as a whole came increasingly to be the subject of cartographic representation, in city views and bird’s-eye maps that tended to be devoid of incidental details or human presence.10See further discussion in Chapter 4; see also Ballon and Friedman, 2007. Again, taking an example from Bologna, the most detailed expression of the city in the sixteenth century is a map produced for the Sala Bologna in the private apartments of the Vatican palace for the Bolognese pope Gregory XIII Boncompagni (1575), a remarkably precise depiction of his home city, in which all the religious institutions are picked out with gilded roofs (fig. 7).11Ghizzoni, 2003; Ghizzoni, 2013; see also Ceccarelli and Aksamija, 2011. Monumental public and religious buildings, residential palaces and even a few shop fronts can be identified, while most of the main streets and public spaces are labelled; recent studies suggest that actual streets are depicted, widened for greater legibility but also to increase the sense of the city’s order and beauty.12Ghizzoni, 2013.
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Description: Map of Bologna by Sabatini, Lorenzo
7. Lorenzo Sabbatini, Map of Bologna, 1575, fresco, Sala Bologna, private apartments, Vatican palace.
These views of the city – as model, as portrait, or as map – all depict the urban realm as comprehensible, bounded and controlled. They offer a perspective, as Michel de Certeau has described it, that makes the ‘spectator into a celestial eye [. . .] that creates readers, makes the complexity of the city readable, and immobilizes its opaque mobility in a transparent text’.13De Certeau, 1984, p. 92. De Certeau was famously reflecting on the view of Manhattan afforded from the top of New York’s World Trade Center, contrasting this with the ‘practiced spaces’ of everyday life that ‘compose a manifold story that has neither author nor spectator, shaped out of fragments of trajectories and alterations of spaces’.14Ibid., p. 93. The binary relationship established here, between the overarching structured vision of the city as a whole and the fine-grained textures of everyday life created through the spatial practices of individuals, offers a useful point of entry to a discussion of the category differences in forms of urban representation in pre-modern Italy.15It is significant that de Certeau specifically identified the ‘celestial eye’ with medieval and Renaissance painters (ibid., p. 92), and speculated that optical knowledge (p. 94) created the city as concept from the sixteenth century. While considerable attention has tended to be paid to the centralising forces of urban design strategies in the Renaissance period – the view from above – far less attention has been paid to how social practices constituted urban space – the view from below.
The chapters that follow consider the street within these two frames. The first offers a comparative overview of the building boom that altered the faces of many Italian cities during the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, with a particular focus on large-scale urban renewal projects, which markedly transformed existing streets and created new ones. Given the scale of such interventions, they can be viewed as expressions of the power of central authorities, and were, indeed, frequently used to stage ephemeral ritual events that exalted the ruling elites by marking their presence through elaborate ceremonials enacted along the renewed arteries they had etched onto the city fabric. Chapter 2 sets out to identify and trace the ways in which urban spaces contained and gave meaning to objects, people and behaviours, to explore the city of everyday experiences, where ‘space is a practiced place’ and ‘every story is a [. . .] spatial practice’.16Ibid., ‘Spatial Stories’, ch. 9, pp. 115, 117. Following de Certeau, it adopts the viewpoint offered by stories such as Masuccio Salernitano’s novella, in which we encounter the city on foot and its residents; here, too, rituals play a part, but they are of quite a different nature. The last chapter of this section turns to the blurred boundaries between centralised or hegemonic (to use Gramsci’s term) spatial expressions of power, and the spaces of everyday life. Through a discussion of the exercise of surveillance in the early modern city, the more entangled coexistence of de Certeau’s two visions of the city emerges.
 
1     Salernitano, 1940, pp. 166–7. »
2     Brand and Pertile, 1996, pp. 153–4. »
3     Salernitano, 1940, p. 169. »
4     Martines, 1994; for the wider context of reading such stories as historical sources, see Martines, 2001, pp. 199–231. »
5     From an extensive literature, see Grendler, 1999. »
6     For a discussion of the ritual function of such imagery, see Camelliti, 2010; Davies, 2007. Discussed further in Chapter 5. »
7     For Francia, see the discussion of earthquake rituals in Chapter 2; see also Negro and Roio, 1998, pp. 81, 157–8; Nevola, 2014, pp. 105–7; Williamson, 1907, pp. 88–90. For Reni’s high altarpiece, see Pepper, 1991. The political significance of the urban scene in the background of Ercole de’ Roberti’s twin portrait of Giovanni II and Ginevra Bentivoglio (National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.) has been noted in Clarke, 1999, pp. 403–5. »
8     For a discussion of how such imagery elaborated the pictorial convention of the Madonna of Mercy, see Marshall, 1994, pp. 506ff.; see also Nevola, 2015. »
9     Examples and details of paintings that capture elements of daily life in the early modern city are discussed in Chapter 5. For the wider context of street scenes, see Jordan Gschwend and Lowe, 2015, pp. 21–2; see also Blumin, 2008, p. 19; Dubbini, 2002. »
10     See further discussion in Chapter 4; see also Ballon and Friedman, 2007. »
11     Ghizzoni, 2003; Ghizzoni, 2013; see also Ceccarelli and Aksamija, 2011. »
12     Ghizzoni, 2013. »
13     De Certeau, 1984, p. 92. »
14     Ibid., p. 93. »
15     It is significant that de Certeau specifically identified the ‘celestial eye’ with medieval and Renaissance painters (ibid., p. 92), and speculated that optical knowledge (p. 94) created the city as concept from the sixteenth century. »
16     Ibid., ‘Spatial Stories’, ch. 9, pp. 115, 117. »
Part 1: Street Life and Street Cultures
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