Chapter 2. Everyday Life on the Streets: Sociability and the Public Realm

Nevola, Fabrizio

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Chapter 2. Everyday Life on the Streets: Sociability and the Public Realm

Fabrizio Nevola

Street Life in Renaissance Italy

Antonio Manetti’s well-known Novella del grasso legnaiuolo (‘The novella of the fat woodcarver’), set in Florence in 1409, describes the elaborate trick played upon the unlucky intarsia master Manetto Ammannatini, nicknamed ‘il Grasso’, by a brigata (‘gang’) of his friends, led by Filippo Brunelleschi. The story takes place in an area no more...

Author

Fabrizio Nevola

PublisherYale University Press

Related print edition pages: pp.67-97

https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00290.2

Stable URL: https://aaeportal.com/?id=-22182

Chapter subject tags:Architecture, Renaissance--ItalyUrban ecology (Sociology)Venice (Italy)Florence (Italy)--HistoryVenice (Italy)--HistoryPublic spaces--ItalyCity and town life--ItalyCity planning--Italy--HistorySiena (Italy)--HistoryPictorial maps, Renaissance

Chapter 2. Everyday Life on the Streets: Sociability and the Public Realm

Unable to work out how events had transpired, Grasso [the Fat One] decided to leave his workshop for a while and go to Santa Maria del Fiore [the cathedral], to have time to think on his own affairs, and to certify better if he were Grasso or Matteo, through the recognition on the faces of the people that he met; even though on account of waking up in his own house [. . .] he was fairly sure of it.1Manetti, 1887, p. 43, Eng. trans. and commentary in Martines, 1994, pp. 171–212, 213–41.

Antonio Manetti’s well-known Novella del grasso legnaiuolo (‘The novella of the fat woodcarver’), set in Florence in 1409, describes the elaborate trick played upon the unlucky intarsia master Manetto Ammannatini, nicknamed ‘il Grasso’, by a brigata (‘gang’) of his friends, led by Filippo Brunelleschi. The story takes place in an area no more precisely defined than the immediate environs of the Baptistery of San Giovanni Battista and the cathedral of Santa Maria del Fiore (the Duomo). It begins with Grasso missing a dinner at which all his other friends were present. As a way to revenge themselves for the perceived affront caused them by his absence, his friends hatched a plan to steal Grasso’s identity by a complicated process that involved switching his name, residence, workplace and friendship network. A large cast of friends and neighbours collaborated in a complex ruse to make him believe that his name was actually Matteo, and that he lived in quite a different part of the city. In the space of twenty-four hours he was sent to the city’s infamous jail, Le Stinche, for brawling with people who ‘misidentified’ him, was released on bail and brought to ‘his’ house in Oltrarno – south of the river and far from his own home, which was by the Duomo. During this time, he met with a number of people, including a nobleman whom he knew by the name of Giovanni di Francesco Rucellai, as well as a lawyer and a priest, all of whom confirmed his identity as ‘Matteo’. Through these various means his very sense of self was eroded, as figures of authority failed to recognise him, and he was displaced to a residential neighbourhood far from his own.

At the end of the day, doped by opiates, he was returned to his actual home, so that when he woke up in the morning to the familiar sound of the Ave Maria bells of Santa Maria del Fiore, he could not understand how he was back in his own bed.2For Grasso’s return home and the reference to the bells, see Manetti, 1887, p. 39. To test the reality of the situation, he picked up the key to his workshop near the baptistery, and went to work; confused and mesmerised by the elaborate trick (beffa), Grasso was unable to fathom what had transpired, and decided to seek public confirmation of his identity. He therefore left his workshop and moved into the city streets, walking to the cathedral, in the hope that recognition in the eyes and faces of the people he met would provide the public proof of his identity that he needed.3Ibid., p. 43 (my trans.). A further stage of the trick, involving Donatello and Brunelleschi, was played out in the cathedral; it amounts to a variation on the same theme of identity theft. So badly did the beffa disconcert him, and – indeed – destroy his self-image by making him a laughing stock among his friends and in his neighbourhood, that Grasso decided to leave Florence and emigrate to Hungary to seek his fortune.

The novella of the fat woodcarver effectively reveals the profoundly spatial dimension of community and neighbourhood in the fifteenth-century city and the critical interaction of people with the urban environment that constitutes the experience of urban space. Grasso’s predicament results from a trick played on him by the close-knit community of his male friends, his brigata, in which authority figures from the legal profession and the Church, as well as the urban elite, served to reinforce and confirm the deception.4For male sociability, see, for instance, Weissman, 1982; Rosenthal, 2010. Of equal importance with these human actors was the stage on which the tale was played out. While the story provides no precise details of the location of Grasso’s home and workshop, these are firmly rooted in the historic core of the city, close to its religious and commercial–industrial centre between the cathedral and baptistery and the Mercato Vecchio. The identity of Grasso was challenged by his forcible relocation to a different area of the city, where no one recognised him and he was lost; more significantly, perhaps, it was the soundscape of his local environment (the bells of the cathedral sounding the Ave Maria) that first alerted him to the fact that he was back home.5For bells in Florence, see Atkinson, 2016b. Although the status quo was re-established, even his home and workplace were insufficient to reassure Grasso of his recovered identity, so he visited the cathedral – the heart of his neighbourhood, and of the city itself – where recognition by his neighbours restored him to himself.

Manetti’s story has attracted numerous interpretations that place significance on different aspects of the beffa, but its underpinning structure relies upon socio-psychological aspects of community networks and the geo-spatial coordinates of the physical environment.6See, for example, Martines, 1994, pp. 213–41, with the central analysis that ‘place and identity went together’ (p. 234); Ruggiero, 2006, with a focus on virtu; Tafuri, 1992, pp. 1–3, 21–3. See also Groebner, 2007, pp. 18–22. By undermining Grasso’s day-to-day local environment, the trick highlights the crucial function of this element in building local community in the early modern city. Manetti’s novella helps us to tease out some of the detail of urban life as it was lived on a daily basis – aspects of the past and its experience that all too easily evade description because they have left only slight traces on the historical record. Nevertheless, visual sources as well as surviving elements of the built fabric provide additional evidence that enables us to re-inscribe places with their original meaning and significance in the transactions of the everyday.

Getting around: Streets, movement and directions

What was a street in Renaissance Italy? Although this may seem a redundant question, it is nonetheless one worth asking, as the urban street and its nature as a public space were contested and fashioned through the constant give and take between private interests and public authorities. While some degree of similarity between the street layouts of antique settlements in a number of Italian cities might suggest that networks were fixed, this was only sometimes the case. Instead, the public infrastructure of street networks in cities was established and consolidated through the medieval period, often in direct opposition to the interests of magnate families, whose residential enclaves took the form of semi-isolated fortified urban bastions.7See Chapter 6. On lineage and property in Tuscany, see English, 1984; Lansing, 1991. For a detailed example from Rome, see Ajello Mahler, 2012. Urban streets came to take on more confidently articulated form during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, and with this came the emergence of more expressive elite residential architecture, the façades of which contributed to fashioning the appearance of the streets themselves.8Friedman, 1992.

Practical and legislative processes underpinned the emergence, development and regularisation of city streets in Italy,9They are discussed in detail in Chapter 1. but it was social practices, as much as legislation, that shaped the urban environment on and adjacent to city streets; a street’s form and evolution gave physical expression to the movement of people engaged in trade, politics, devotional practice and life-cycle rituals. Streets encode the regular itineraries and actions of people, which through repetition are inscribed on the fabric of the city, and subsequently, themselves, become an amenity to be protected or improved.10Rykwert, 1978, p. 15. We focus here on social practices that gave form to and were, in turn, structured by the built environment of the public realm. Looking at how people moved through the streets and experienced the city serves to counterbalance the concept of the street as primarily an architectural construct with a view of the street as a social environment.

In recent years, movement has become increasingly intrinsic to the analysis of everyday urban experience; indeed, recent sociology has coined the notion of a ‘mobility turn’ in the humanities, a phrase designed to echo the ‘spatial turn’ identified by cultural geographer Denis Cosgrove some time ago.11Cosgrove, 2004; Shortell and Brown, 2016, p. 5. For foundational work, see de Certeau, 1984, pp. 91–109; Lefebvre, 1991. Historians of early modern Italy, adapting the ideas of influential thinkers such as Michel de Certeau, have started to incorporate everyday movement into an already vigorous scholarship addressing the spatialised politics of urban existence.12Atkinson, 2019; de Vivo, 2016; Eckstein, 2016. Theorists of the twentieth-century city have considered individuals as engaged in a solitary and alienated practice as they move in and act upon the urban environment; by contrast, for the early modern period, walking has been described as a practice through which city dwellers effectively produced urban spaces and forged communal relations in what was ‘an intensely social activity’, as Filippo de Vivo points out.13Following the influential observations of Benjamin, 1997, and Benjamin, 1999; de Vivo, 2016, pp. 140–41. Walking was one of the critical ways in which identity was shaped. In the often crowded streets of the early modern city, people were constantly engaged in relocating and re-establishing their sense both of self and of community, in a physical fabric alive with personal and familial, local and civic resonances.14Atkinson, 2011.

One of the more absurd of the scabrous tales collected by Pietro Fortini in the sixteenth century tells of a Sienese merchant whose travels had brought him to Venice, where he had had an affair with a Flemish woman.15Poggiali, 1815, vol. 1, p. 215 (novella II). On returning to Siena, he taught his wife some Flemish and, somewhat unaccountably, told her that the Flemish sentence ‘Would you like to have sex?’ meant ‘Would you like to eat?’ The consequences are almost too obvious to relate, but for the detail. The couple owned a shop near the Campo, the city’s central piazza, where the man’s wife ran a stall selling food to pilgrims. Fortini writes: ‘as everyone knows, at that time of year [summer] many people go on pilgrimage, and on account of the fact that it was pleasant weather and because it was a jubilee year, many people came by [Siena].’16Ibid. A group of Flemings, ‘who were on the journey to St Peter’s, and were going to Rome for the indulgence’, happened by the Campo, and the husband’s man-of-the-world prank predictably backfires.

This story captures various aspects that can be developed further. In Siena the north–south passage of those engaged in trade and pilgrimage meant that the local population were regularly in contact with people from outside the city. The traffic of pilgrims, in particular, which fluctuated widely in relation to the season and also to the calling of jubilee years in Rome, offered opportunities for local traders, whose shops and stalls clustered around the city’s main streets and piazza. Here, both traders in luxury goods and service providers, such as the fast-food seller who is the subject of the story, jostled for custom. Mobility and sexual licence are also encoded in the story, in respect both of the husband who travels to Venice, and of the Flemish pilgrims passing through Siena. Within the city, movement was almost exclusively on foot, and was concentrated along the main thoroughfare, the strada Romana (a section of the pilgrim route known as the via Francigena), which channelled movement through Siena and on towards Rome.17For the wider context of the story in relation to Siena’s trade and pilgrimage, see Nevola, 2007; on food hawkers, see Tuliani, 2007; for the seasonal traffic of pilgrims, see Piccinni, 2003.

Such incidents as this, though exaggerated for comic effect by the author Fortini, provide a flavour of the everyday encounters that the street facilitated and controlled. The street functions as a technology in the urban system, controlling access, regulating flows and encouraging rests and stops. Nowhere was this more the case than at points where the extra-urban road network met the dense urban fabric – locations that were usually marked by city gates, where new arrivals were policed and taxed, and around which services were provided for the accommodation of travellers.18For provocative discussion of this subject, see Jütte, 2014. These primary access points conditioned urban form. In Siena they imposed a strong north–south axis, while in Rome the primary access to the city was marked by the northern Porta del Popolo development, which by the later sixteenth century had adopted a complex trivium form of streets radiating from a large central piazza, punctuated by pilgrimage churches.19Zanchettin, 2005b. In spite of Venice’s exceptional setting on the lagoon, there relatively standardised access points were provided from the mainland along the Grand Canal and from the open sea into the Bacino di San Marco (the vast stretch of water between St Mark’s Square and the island of San Giorgio Maggiore); the wide open space adjacent to the ducal palace formed a piazza connecting the heart of the city to the sea (fig. 38).20Fortini Brown, 1990, p. 140. Similar patterns can be observed throughout Italy.

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Description: View of Venice by Fialetti, Odoardo

38. Odoardo Fialetti, View of Venice, 1611, oil on joined canvas, Eton College.

Roads were not the only way to enter a city, and although Venice is the best-known urban centre in Italy where water played a central part in the transport infrastructure, it was by no means the only one. Waterways were significant for both trade and travel, whether by river or sea, to all cities built on or close to water. In Milan, a highly developed system of canals (navigli) connected the city to its neighbouring subject towns, as well as north to Lakes Como and Maggiore; the canals were the principal means for transporting goods into the city, and underpinned its flourishing industries from at least the fourteenth century.21Malara, 1996, pp. 29–73; for discussion of the marble transported from the Alps for the construction of the cathedral, see Welch, 1995, pp. 78–81. For images recording the now largely lost network of canals, see Buccellati and Grandi, 1987; Finazzer Flory, 2007. The proper operation of the canal system was a recurrent concern for the city administration and rulers: expansion of the network, dredging and constant provision of water are all issues that recur in the documents. Barges of different sizes enabled goods to be transported on the smaller network of canals inside the city walls.22For disputes in the 1390s regarding marble-supply problems for the cathedral, see Welch, 1995, p. 79; for Filippo Maria Visconti’s expansion of the network and preference for travel by water, see Malara, 1996, pp. 61–3.

Similarly, in the flat landscape of the Po’s catchment area, canals and navigable rivers were a central part of the infrastructure within and between cities, including Modena, Parma, Mantua, Ferrara and Bologna (fig. 39).23Pesci, Ugolini and Venturi, 2005, pp. 157–79; Tuohy, 1996, pp. 154–60 (focusing on the elaborate barges (bucintori) prepared for the dukes). The best records we have of the use of these waterways document the progress of important individuals moving between one city and another, although wider patterns of usage are suggested by these itineraries. Thus, for instance, when Pius II made his journey to the Council of Mantua in May 1459, he travelled from Ferrara to Mantua by barge; similarly, when in 1487 the daughter of Ercole I d’Este travelled from Ferrara to marry Annibale Bentivoglio in Bologna, the party travelled by boat, as did the daughter of Giovanni II Bentivoglio when she went to Mantua to marry Giovanni Gonzaga in 1494.24Piccolomini, 1984, vol. 1, pp. 411–13; see also Pesci, Ugolini and Venturi, 2005, p. 158. This developed network of canals and rivers meant that, where possible, freight travelled by barge, and cities developed infrastructure to manage the transfer and taxation of goods coming into the city by water. In Bologna, for instance, considerable investment was made in developing the Canale Naviglio, which extended the reach of the waterways closer to the city centre, and in the creation of a new complex called the Porta Dogana (fig. 40).25Pesci, Ugolini and Venturi, 2005, pp. 157–9. By the mid-sixteenth century, this complex included a tavern, warehouses and offices for the doganiere (‘customs official’) and the catenarolo (who operated a chain that closed the canal entry to the city); in 1667, a low-relief terracotta sculpture of the Madonna was placed on the customs house façade.26Ibid., p. 161; the 1667 Madonna may well simply have replaced an earlier image.

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Description: The Month of June, detail by Master of the Wide Eyes

39. River traffic on the river Po at Ferrara, detail from Master of the ‘Wide Eyes’, The Month of June, c. 1467–9, fresco, Salone dei Mesi, Palazzo Schifanoia, Ferrara.

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Description: Gate and customs house at the Porta Dogana on the Canale Naviglio, Bologna by...

40. Gate and customs house at the Porta Dogana on the Canale Naviglio, Bologna, after an etching by Pio Panfili, 1779, private collection.

River ports might function in a similar way, but raised the practical problem of how to regulate access to the city from quays that were often in quite central locations. In Rome the ports of Ripetta (in the north, close to piazza del Popolo) and Ripa Grande (to the south, sea-facing, in Trastevere) were regulated by detailed statutes, which gave sweeping powers over all imports to the tax officials operating from the customs house.27Complete statutes from the 15th century are published in Palermo, 1979, pp. 269ff. Although it was well positioned to supply the city, Ripetta backed onto a relatively rough district, and was flanked by the ortacci (‘bad-lands’) where the city’s waste was dumped in the river; a site of arrival and transit, the port had a tavern and was frequented by prostitutes.28Zanchettin, 2005a, pp. 131–2; see also Marder, 1980, pp. 29–31. For the concentration of prostitution in the area around the Mausoleum of Augustus, see Chapter 3. Times of access to and from the ports were set by specific bells, and the customs officials were permitted to carry weapons night and day to enforce their authority.29Palermo, 1979, 1463 statutes, rubric XI, p. 294 (noting that access to and from Ripetta was signalled by the third ring of the bell of the church of Santa Maria in Torre), rubric XXVIII, p. 299. Ripetta was evidently a dangerous part of town: when Juan Borgia, Pope Alexander VI’s son, was murdered in 1497, the boatman who found the body by the port reported that this was a not uncommon sight.30Zanchettin, 2005a, p. 130 n. 25.

Sites of transit, whether gates or port facilities, were places that attracted violence and disorder, and were increasingly policed and controlled. Gambling, prostitution and petty theft were common in the taverns and hostels that clustered around the edges of the city, and landlords were often required by the city authorities to keep records of visitors, thus providing a rudimentary form of surveillance and policing.31Crime and taverns are discussed further in Chapter 4; see Salzberg, 2019. Gates, and the walls in which they were set, were intended to provide security for the city, through their defensive military structures and by regulating day-to-day access; they also established set points of entry, from which the city’s arterial system of streets converged on the commercial, political and religious centre. As such, gates also served to structure and regulate movement through the city, setting up the hierarchy within the street network; indeed, their monumental scale and symbolic presence often extended into the urban fabric, as the gates themselves and the streets leading to them might share the same name. A gate facing towards Rome might thus be known as Porta Romana, as in Siena (fig. 41), the street leading to it as the via di Porta Romana; in Romagna, the historic importance of the exarchate city of Ravenna was acknowledged in the name Porta Ravegnana given to gates and streets facing towards it. And so on. These central arteries tended to be the first to be paved; early city statutes from across Italy identify the fact that it was ‘useful and proper and beautiful’ for main streets to be surfaced, maintained and kept clear of projecting temporary structures.32Friedman, 1992, pp. 72ff., though the legislation was regularly ignored and properly enforced only by the 15th century (see also Chapter 1). The Latin root for strada (‘street’) is sternere, ‘to pave’.

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Description: Porta Romana by Lombardi, Paolo

41. Porta Romana, Siena. Photograph by Paolo Lombardi, late 19th century.

Paving accorded respectability to a street, which would be largely occupied by pedestrians; although elites frequently travelled on horseback, especially when moving outside or between cities, pedestrian traffic was unquestionably prevalent. The city was, therefore, first and foremost experienced on foot, and written accounts are generally informed by this vantage point, though this is rarely acknowledged since it was the norm. As sociologists and urban theorists have observed in relation to the contemporary city, walking in the city determines high levels of engagement by individuals with their surroundings.33From a vast literature, key texts that outline an experiential approach to street life are Benjamin, 1999; de Certeau, 1984, pp. 91–109; Gehl, 1987; Merleau-Ponty, 2002; Pallasmaa, 2005. The sort of encomiastic descriptive accounts of most cities that were common from the fourteenth century onwards were put together by local residents, whose cataloguing and quantification of features and landmarks were conducted through close observation.34Numerous such accounts survive; for a selection in English, see Dean, 2000, pp. 5–62. For how literary accounts were informed by the city experienced through the act of walking, see Atkinson, 2016a. Dense passages in these accounts mirror the quantity of information to be recorded, such as the great variety of trades that operated around market squares, or the number of revered devotional sites to be visited: they strongly suggest that the texts reflect the experience of moving through such locations. Likewise, foreign travellers, who often noted details, features and customs taken for granted by local residents, predominantly moved around the city on foot; they might do so in the company of a local guide or, by the sixteenth century, perhaps even with a guidebook in hand – another form of text that interpreted the city for visitors.35On foreign travellers, see Nevola, Bardati and Renzulli, 2012; for chorographic accounts, see Atkinson, 2016a, pp. 193–206, in relation to accounts by Petrarch and Flavio Biondo.

Marcantonio Sabellico’s description of Venice (c. 1492) has been shown to be consciously structured to follow a circuitous tour of the city conducted on foot, starting from the western edge, proceeding to the eastern extremities beyond the Arsenal, and moving back to the centre at San Marco, where the account ends.36De Vivo, 2016, pp. 119–21 (with map of the itinerary, fig. 1). The itinerary effectively evokes the complex street network of the lagoon city, twisting and turning around waterways criss-crossed by bridges. And yet, of course, in Venice, as Marin Sanudo noted in his 1493 account of the city, ‘one can go, and does go, in two ways: by foot on land, or by boat.’37Quoted in ibid., p. 123. Canals provided the privileged pathways favoured by elites and merchants, who could afford to move about the city by private boat, and whose residences often had access by water as well as by land – a degree of mobility that conferred prestige.38See, for instance, Fortini Brown, 2004; see also Savoy, 2012. However, water was not a barrier to movement by less affluent citizens, as an efficient network of traghetti (‘ferries’) facilitated crossings of the Grand Canal and other waterways in the city, as well as providing connections with the outlying islands (fig. 42).39De Vivo, 2016, p. 124; Lowe, 2013, pp. 430–33; Romano, 1994, pp. 368–9.

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Description: Hunting on the Lagoon by Carpaccio, Vittore

42. Vittore Carpaccio, Hunting on the Lagoon, c. 1490–95, oil on panel, J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles.

As a city built on water, with an intricate canal system, Venice depended on its waterways for the movement of both individuals and goods. Gondolas developed as a specialised local means of transport for elites, and Marin Sanudo drew a parallel between the cost and status of owning one of these boats with those of owning a horse on the mainland.40Romano, 1994, p. 360; for discussion of the favoured status of black gondoliers, see Lowe, 2013. The cost of a gondola varied according to the degree of luxury of its furnishings, as well as the number of oarsmen; competition between owners eventually led to sumptuary laws (1563) that regulated the degree of display permitted.41Romano, 1994, p. 362. While men, of course, made use of gondolas, particular mention was made by contemporaries of the gondola as a good means of transport for women; it saved their having to walk in the street, and provided a private space that celebrated status while preserving honour.42Ibid., p. 363. Private water-borne transport facilitated transfers and reduced travelling time; it also restricted social encounters and circumvented the crowds at nodal points in the city, though scenes such as Vittore Carpaccio’s Miracle of the True Cross at the Rialto Bridge (c. 1496) suggest that busy sites provided enjoyable opportunities for sociability.43Galleria dell’Academia, Venice.

Travelling by boat provided quite a different view of the urban environment, and throughout Venice there is evidence that, in the context of ‘water-based urbanism’, architects and patrons alike considered the water front of a building as equal if not superior in importance to the street façade.44This is, of course, a central factor in Venice’s architectural history. It is not discussed further here, but see Howard, 2002, pp. 43–54; the point is developed extensively in Savoy, 2012. While the ceremonial splendour of the unified façade of the Grand Canal may have been enjoyed in its entirety only by individuals able to travel along its length in a gondola, the fifteen traghetti that criss-crossed this principal waterway afforded multiple opportunities for pedestrians to experience the city from the water.45De Vivo, 2016, p. 124, with reference to Sanudo’s account; Zanelli, 1997. Water traffic was by no means exclusively made up of gondolas and traghetti: the city’s congested waterways were also used to move the goods that fuelled its flourishing economy. Once unloaded from ships, goods were transported internally on barges, which connected the mainland and docks to the city’s local markets and shops, as well as the main commercial centre around Rialto, where only the final stage of the journey would take place on barrows, which were designed to negotiate the city’s narrow streets.46See, for example, Crouzet-Pavan, 1992, pp. 265–89; Howard, 2002, pp. 48–9. The ability to disentangle pedestrian from goods traffic was a remarkable feature of the Venetian land–water infrastructure system, and when Leonardo da Vinci proposed an idealised transport network for Milan in the 1480s, he envisioned an arrangement whereby all freight travelled along the canals, while the raised streets were reserved for people.47Malara, 1996, p. 70 (quoting Milan, Biblioteca Ambrosiana, Codex Atlanticus, B, fol. 37v).

Even in centres where there were no waterways to provide alternative means of transport, walking was not the only way in which people moved around cities, although it was without question the most common. Horses and pack animals often appear in paintings of contemporary urban settings. In Ambrogio Lorenzetti’s depiction of the city in the Palazzo Pubblico in Siena, the high status of the couple in the wedding procession on the left side of the scene is denoted by their riding on horseback, while two gentlemen with fashionable hats also ride along a street in the middle ground (see fig. 1). On the right-hand side of the scene three packhorses can be seen entering the city with bales of goods and bundles of wood; another has been relieved of its burden and is heading back out towards the gate, while a customer at a shoe shop holds his unloaded donkey by its bridle. Outside the city gate, the road through the countryside is busy with animals, and again the principal distinction is between those riding on horseback and pack animals transporting goods in and out of the city. Pack animals were evidently crucial for the transportation of goods; by contrast, riding on horseback had a long tradition of association with higher-status individuals, though by the fifteenth century in Italy it was by no means limited to noblemen and knights. The inclusion of iron horse-stays on private and public buildings attests to the practical need to provide a place to tether horses while their owners were engaged in business with shopkeepers whose botteghe faced onto the street, or within the offices housed in civic buildings and private palaces.

The risks of urban streets, where pedestrians shared often narrow spaces with horses and their riders, are brought home in a series of images depicting the Justice of Trajan to a Widow, a story drawn from the Golden Legend.48Bowd, 2010, p. 90. The story tells of a widow who turned to the emperor Trajan to seek justice for the death of her son, who had been mown down by ‘one of Trajan’s sons [. . .] galloping his horse recklessly through the city’; in return for her loss, Trajan gave her his own son, in addition to a considerable reward. In a panel from what is probably a dismembered cassone (‘marriage chest’) painted in Verona in the latter part of the fifteenth century, we see an urban scene in which the woman turns to the emperor, gesturing behind her to the lifeless body of her son, laid out on the street, while, close by, the offending rider and his shocked pages look on (fig. 37). A cassone panel by Giovanni di Ser Giovanni (known as ‘Lo Scheggia’), depicting the same theme, dwells less on the dead son, and more on the widow’s reward: we see her return to her humble home with the emperor’s son on her arm, and assorted servants carrying her compensation, including the warhorse and a heavy chest, itself decorated with horses.49Klapisch-Zuber, 1995, p. 12 n. 5; see also Bellosi and Haines, 1999, p. 83. The panel was sold at Christie’s, London, 6 July 2017, lot 13. As a classical story emblematic of civic virtue and magnanimity, the tale circulated in both visual form (including, in Brescia, as a print of 1502 by Giovanni Maria da Brescia), and as an example in a number of late-fifteenth-century sermon cycles.50Bowd, 2010, p. 90; the legend is also referred to by Dante in Purgatorio, canto X, 73–93. More prosaically, the visual representation brings home in a poignant way the real dangers posed by riders, and also underlines the implied immunity of high-ranking citizens when such traffic accidents involved weaker members of society, such as the poor, women and children.

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Description: Trajan and the Widow: I by Unknown

37. Unknown Veronese artist, Trajan and the Widow: I, 1475–1500(?), tempera on panel, National Gallery, London.

Extending the transport divide still further, coaches were introduced to Italy by the latter part of the fifteenth century. At first used principally by elite women, by the middle of the following century, especially in Rome, they were adopted widely by the highest echelons of ecclesiastical and secular society; by the turn of the sixteenth century, they had become a defining status symbol among the city’s elite.51Hunt, 2014, pp. 177–81; see also Lotz, 1973. Coaches were often luxuriously decorated, and had as many as six horses to draw them; the horses’ trappings and the grooms’ livery might identify the owner through the use of heraldic colours and symbols.52Hunt, 2014, pp. 180–81. Like gondolas in Venice, carriages provided their occupants with a privileged position – in this case, raised above the street. The passengers in a coach or carriage were at once highly visible, but could also enjoy privacy if they wished; concealed behind doors and curtains, hot-headed violent youths, courtesans and their customers, or scheming ambassadors could move through the city unseen.53On prostitutes using carriages, see Storey, 2008. The growing numbers of such vehicles in Rome resulted in traffic problems, especially around the principal churches and on holidays.54Lotz, 1973; the classic example of architecture responding to the demands of carriage traffic is the reordering by Pietro da Cortona of the small piazza in front of Santa Maria della Pace to provide a oneway system for carriages to move through the space. Legislation sought to control these issues by establishing rights of way and precedence, determined by the status of the owners of the vehicles, though the criminal archives record numerous instances of brawls and conflicts that arose between rival coachmen and pages.55Hunt, 2014, pp. 182ff.

At the other end of the spectrum of road traffic from elite coaches and carriages, carts used to transport goods were a prominent feature of the street, and were usually drawn by packs of oxen. These slow-moving vehicles could obviously carry considerably more freight than a single beast of burden, and were used for transporting agricultural produce such as grain and hay from the countryside, or building materials such as stone from quarries.56For evidence of the considerable carting costs (often outweighing the purchase cost) of stone for the cathedral of Siena, see AOMS, 917 (1059), 1481–95, ‘Spese per la cavatura e trasporto di pietra’, and other volumes in the series; see also Aronow, 1985. Their size and weight posed hazards for pedestrians, and even for riders; incidents involving carts are the subject of many ex voto commemorative paintings that record escapes from near-death encounters with these early modern behemoths. One simple image in the Madonna del Monte in Cesena records an accident in which the son of a carter, Bernardino Zavalune, was caught up by the rear wheel of a cart and risked being crushed.57Jacobs, 2013, pp. 334. A somewhat more exceptional image from the ex voto collection of the basilica of St John Lateran in Rome records the dramatic escape of Tommaso Fedro Inghirami, who, as he rode through the Arch of Titus in the Campo Vaccino (the Forum), collided with a cart loaded with sacks of grain and was thrown from his horse.58Ibid., pp. 33–5, 135–7; Rowland, 2001, pp. 151–2; Silver and Rowland, 2019. The remarkable image shows the drama unfold (fig. 43). In the background, through the arch, the portly humanist prelate can be seen riding away from his vigna (‘suburban garden’) in the company of two friends; the foreground is filled by the scene of the accident, while above (top right) Christ and Sts Peter and Paul are depicted, by whose miraculous intervention Inghirami is preserved from danger (periculo), as the inscription underlines. The picture is filled with the large cart and its team of wild-eyed oxen, which the two drivers are violently trying to control, while Inghirami’s horse or mule stands riderless by the arch. The huge wheels of the cart roll over the Inghirami’s black vestments, but having fallen between them he is miraculously unharmed as the cart trundles over his prone body, and his two friends bend down to help him up. Examples such as these give a glimpse of the nature of traffic that occupied the often narrow streets of the pre-modern city. We may note in passing that the use of simple stone quoining on the corners of buildings suggests the need to protect the structures from carts and other unwieldy vehicles, which left their mark on the physical fabric just as they posed a risk to pedestrians.

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Description: Ex voto of Tommaso Inghirami, Fallen under an Ox-Cart in Rome by Unknown

43. Unknown artist, Ex voto of Tommaso Inghirami, Fallen under an Ox-Cart in Rome, oil on panel, c. 1508, basilica of St John Lateran, Rome.

Way-finding: Locations and directions

Whether people moved on foot or horseback, in a carriage or a gondola, it is worth considering how movement within the city operated at a practical level. Today we are used to finding an address using maps, street names and house numbers; postcodes and digital mapping technology help to bring us right to the doorstep of even the most obscure shops and private homes. But house numbers, and even street names in their regularised modern form, were unknown in early modern cities. So how did people move around cities in the past? How did they find their way or get instructions – all the more so if they were unfamiliar visitors from a different place? One obvious answer lies in the privileged pathways that were set out by the arterial routes from the city gates, which channelled movement through the city. A tale from Franco Sacchetti’s fourteenth-century Trecentonovelle describes a headstrong horse (ronzino) from Siena, whose owner lent him to one Alberto; reluctant to leave the city, the horse refused to step beyond the city gate, so the rider had to turn round, whereupon the horse trotted merrily back to the piazza del Campo.59Sacchetti, 1970, pp. 32–3 (novella XII). St Bernardino of Siena made a similar point in one of his famous Lenten sermons, delivered on the Campo in 1427, commenting that ‘he who should want to come to the Campo from outside the city of Siena, may enter from the gate of Camollia or from the Nuova [Romana] or Fontebranda gates: there are many ways in, but all arrive at the same destination.’60Bernardino da Siena, 1989, vol. 2, pp. 1040–41. The horse without a rider, like the traveller, pilgrim, merchant or honoured visitor, followed a natural pathway that was carved through the dense fabric of the city.61On pathways and movement in Venice, see Fortini Brown, 1990, pp. 136–87; Howard, 1993–4.

Much the same can be said for the privileged routes that emerged in other cities. In Rome, a limited set of arterial thoroughfares facilitated the movement of visitors to the city from the northern gate of Porta del Popolo towards the centre, while the east–west connections between the Vatican, Capitoline and St John Lateran, were along the main streets of the via Papalis and via Peregrinorum (see Chapter 1). In Venice, while the Grand Canal and Bacino di San Marco formed the principal ceremonial route through the city, pedestrian connections between the commercial district of Rialto and the administrative centre at San Marco formed the Mercería artery, densely packed with shops. Even in centres whose morphologies were shaped by grid layouts inherited from antiquity – such as Florence or Bologna – the city’s main gates aligned to streets that tended towards the central squares. Often, indeed, the gates’ names or the streets leading to them echoed the ultimate destination that travellers leaving or arriving might encounter; Porta Romana and via Bolognese in Florence, or Porta Ravegnana (for Ravenna) in Bologna.

And yet, of course, movement and way-finding in the city, for locals and foreigners alike, was not confined to these main arterial routes. As we have seen, the story of Manetto, the fat woodcarver, is based on the premise that city residents were most at home in their local neighbourhoods, whose topography they intimately knew.62Urban and architectural historians have mined this story extensively; see, recently, Atkinson, 2016a, pp. 188–93. The tightest social relationships operated in quite closely circumscribed neighbourhoods, and tended to endure over generations, as families of all social ranks frequently had long-term attachments with specific areas.63Classic studies remain Kent, 1971; Kent and Kent, 1982. Orientation for local residents was simple enough, but what is perhaps less evident is the degree to which the relative stability of residence patterns and clustering of trades itself became a key factor in the spatial definition of the city. Family names, the names of particular trades, as well as the names of principal religious institutions and local parish churches were commonly associated with streets or districts in the city. Way-finding was bound up with neighbourhood knowledge and landmarks; churches, prominent family palaces with their coats of arms, illustrated shop signs, street-corner shrines or benches where men gossiped all contributed to the spatial practices of movement and navigation.64The various sites are discussed in more detail in Part 2.

The tale of the fat woodcarver plays on an exaggerated version of the hyperlocal networks in the life of an urban artisan in the fifteenth century, and there is plenty of evidence from many cities that reveals the degree of mobility required of workers and artisans, who might commute considerable distances from their homes to their workplaces on a daily basis.65Cohn, 1980, pp. 124ff. While, in Venice, most manufacturing industries were on the city’s edges, in a city like Florence there remained a concentration in the centre, while industries such as tanning and dyeing gathered together beside the Arno because they required large quantities of water.66Calabi, 2001, pp. 46–65; Cohn, 1980; de Vivo, 2016, p. 122. Trade tended to be focused around central market areas in most cities, where permanent shops, temporary stalls and street vendors vied for custom.67See Chapter 4; see also Calabi, 1997; Calabi, 2004; Welch, 2005. The degree of spatial specialisation and clustering of commercial and industrial activity did not necessarily align with the domestic arrangements of workers, the majority of whom lived in peripheral areas of the city where rents were lower.68Cavallo, 2006; Spilner, 1987.

It is difficult to reassemble the daily journeys of workers from home to workplace. The absence of visual or written records documenting the daily itineraries of city residents as they went about their business can in part be made good from the written records of bureaucrats and officials, whose work was conducted from house to house along the streets of the city. Tax records – such as the catasto or decima in Florence, and the lira in Siena – were regularly compiled and reviewed throughout the fifteenth century, as all householders submitted a declaration describing the composition of their household, their property and their wealth.69Catoni and Piccinni, 1984; Jamison, 2016. The major change in practice is that while self-assessment declarations formed the basis of the catasto or lira in the 15th century, by the following century the data were collected by officials. These formulaic accounts locate each property with reference to administrative boundaries of districts or parishes, then quite carefully by listing the immediately adjacent neighbours, and they usually also name the pubblica via (‘public street’) onto which the property faced. Scholarly interest has tended to focus on the demographic and financial data, though more recently attention has turned to revealing the underlying social practices of the bureaucracies that created these documents.70The classic analysis of the 1427 Florentine catasto is Herlihy and Klapisch Zuber, 1985. A language-based approach to similar sources, which explores their significance for geography and space, is outlined in Smail, 2000. Tax records and census practices can be understood as kinetic, experiential exercises in street-walking, through which we can capture a glimpse of the ways in which people navigated space and described proximity. In this regard, Nicholas Eckstein has coined the evocative term the ‘prepositional city’ to characterise the topographies of proximity expressed in tax documents that describe the neighbourhoods of fifteenth-century Florence: houses or shops were identified as being ‘next to,’ ‘in front of,’ or bounded on one side by the pubblica via.71Eckstein, 2016; Eckstein, 2018. The language adopted by individuals to describe the locations of their homes employed everyday vocabulary and usage to identify spatial coordinates defined by family, parish and neighbourhood.

Writing his account of Milan in 1288, Bonvesin della Riva reported ‘the houses with doorways onto public streets have been found to number about 12,500, in very many of which several families cohabit’, suggesting that census gathering corroborated these numbers, and that practices comparable with those documented more extensively from the fifteenth century were already in use.72Dean, 2000, pp. 11–16. The tax declarations that make up the Sienese lira series are, like the Florentine catasto, made up of declarations (portate) that adhere to a common formula: residents declare where they live, whether as owner or tenant, in which part of the city (Siena was divided into thirds not quarters), and which district, and then on which street. So, for example, in 1481 the grocer Antonio di Agostino di Domenico, a resident of the Casato di Sotto district close to piazza del Campo, declared that his house ‘neighbours on one side with the property of Andrea d’Antonio the shoemaker and the convent of the friars of Sant’Agostino on the other, and on the other side the public street’.73ASS, Lira, 185, fol. 301. Just as in Florence, individuals defined location by naming confini (‘neighbouring properties’), setting their homes in relation to the immediate environment they inhabited. However, since not all individuals used the same language and points of reference, it is very difficult to assemble these subjectively expressed place coordinates to create any objective map of the city from the written records.74Niall Atkinson proposes to create a map of the 1427 catasto, based on the internal evidence of the portate. For an early instance (1525) of systematic door-to-door surveys along a fixed route, see Eckstein, 2018, n. 84.

As the bureaucracies that assembled census and other data became more tightly controlled, so it becomes increasingly possible to reconstruct these subjective geographies into a spatial model of the city. For instance, the Decima Granducale census of Florence in 1561–2 was systematically compiled by a team of officials who moved from house to house, recording details of each household, down one side of a street, and back up the other.75ASF, 325, Decima Granducale, 3780–84 (volume 3784 refers only to shops). For an overview of the innovative and ongoing digital reconstruction of the survey using GIS, see Terpstra and Rose, 2013, online at http://decima-map.net/ (accessed 14 June 2016). As with the 1427 catasto, they described properties in terms of the proximity of one to another – as being ‘next to’, ‘above’, ‘facing’, and so on – but the volumes the officials compiled list properties sequentially, according to the itinerary they followed, and with occasional references to local landmarks like parish churches or street corners, so that it is possible to follow their routes quite accurately on a map. Similarly, as part of the public-health response to the plague that struck Florence from 1630, the confraternity of San Michele Arcangelo conducted a house-by-house survey (visita) of the working-class districts, where poor sanitation exacerbated the effects of the contagion.76Eckstein, 2016, pp. 12ff. More broadly on Florentine plague censuses, see Cipolla, 1976; Cipolla 1986. Again, they used terminology of proximity to describe the streets and neighbourhoods that they surveyed, creating an eye-level walking map, as Eckstein has described it, of the most deprived section of Florentine society.77Eckstein, 2016, pp. 18–19.

Such walking-based, micro-spatial surveying practices were not, of course, limited to Florence.78A recent flourishing of scholarly interest in spatial and digital approaches to mapping urban space has been spearheaded by examples drawn from Florence; for a collection of essays that sets out this approach, see Terpstra and Rose, 2016. Numerous types of archival document record the application of spatial descriptions to locations in a more piecemeal or geographically circumscribed way; for instance, notarised contracts for property transactions use text to map the boundaries of properties, listing neighbours as well as the street.79For an example of how notarial documents might be used to reconstruct a property block, see de Courcey-Bayley, 1998. Likewise, documentation recording the activities of city officials who oversaw urban maintenance and improvement used a comparable system and vocabulary to pinpoint accurately the properties that were singled out for works.80For further discussion of these offices, see Chapter 1. In Rome, rent books were compiled by confraternities that managed large portfolios of domestic and commercial property from at least the fifteenth century, and in an increasingly systematic way from the late sixteenth century.81Friedman, 2012. An early example of the written records of the hospital of San Salvatore lists all its properties in 1420; the records focus on the legal instruments by means of which the properties had passed to the confraternity, give the locations, briefly identified by district, and define their boundaries, listing the names of the owners of adjacent properties, as in the Florentine examples discussed above.82Ibid., p. 283. Interestingly, these textual accounts gave way in the sixteenth century to graphic surveys, richly annotated with additional information, which included details about neighbouring properties and whether they faced onto a street. More dynamic mapping practices indicated directionality in naming streets: in such cases, the survey plans were marked with labels that did not simply refer in general terms to the pubblica strada, but showed where the street led. Thus, a building might be listed as being on the ‘street that comes from the Collegio Romano and goes to the Piazza della Minerva’, a wording that captures the movement of the surveyor compiling the records in situ, while also indicating that the streets were acquiring names of their own.83Ibid., pp. 290ff.; Friedman observes that only very few streets on Leonardo Bufalini’s 1560 map are named.

In spite of the growing hold of bureaucracies on the management of urban space, the processes and language used to describe location from the fifteenth on into the seventeenth century relied on a common vocabulary of proximity. This is not especially surprising, as a key finding of the twentieth-century urban theorist Kevin Lynch was that people navigate urban space through personal experience, which they describe with reference to perceived elements (on a larger scale, such as districts and edges) and visual elements (of a more localised kind, such as landmarks and nodes).84For five elements of ‘urban image-ability’, see Lynch, 1960, pp. 46–90; the subject is discussed further at the beginning of Chapter 4. The ‘prepositional’ approach provides a point of entry to way-finding in the pre-modern city, where locals and foreigners alike moved through the space and described that movement with reference to a sliding and increasingly local set of coordinates. By contrast, the growing systematisation of census and surveying techniques through the latter half of the sixteenth century also coincided, of course, with technical developments that resulted in accurate city maps.85See, for example, Ballon and Friedman, 2007. Eye-level, text-based mapping by individual citizens came to be replaced by centralised practices, and with these the street became another site for the centralised ordering of space and the exercise of government authority and control. It might therefore be suggested that practical instances of a changing optic from the street-level survey to the ‘celestial eye’ of the map align closely with the socio-political reading of urban space offered by Henri Lefebvre, as heterogeneous ‘representational spaces’ came to be replaced by normative ‘representations of space’.86The distinction is one of Lefebvre’s key concepts, and he adduces evidence of the transformation from 16th-century Florence; Lefebvre, 1991, pp. 38–9, 80, 128ff.

Sensing the city: Meaning and experience

The street was the arena within which everyday urban experience unfolded through a variety of sensory encounters. It is possible to recover some of this evanescent experience of city life – what it was like to move around streets, to hear the sounds of bells and town criers, to absorb the complex social meanings associated with particular locations, and to feel the surprise that ephemeral changes to these could elicit from local residents and visitors alike. The urban sensorium can in part be recovered by adapting the subtle and nuanced methodological approach developed nearly fifty years ago by Michael Baxandall for the contextualised viewing of Renaissance Italian paintings – a method succinctly summarised in the concept of ‘period eyes.’87Baxandall, 1972; for a useful discussion of the book and its impact, see Hills, 2011; for correction to its male-merchant bias, see Randolph, 2004. Contextualising objects by means of their careful analysis in relation to contemporary written sources, and decompressing the shorthand implicit in the forms and actions represented in the art of past periods, Baxandall sought to bridge the interpretative divide between past and present, and trained a generation of scholars to view art in a new way.88For further assessment of Baxandall’s method, see Rubin, 2007. His approach to paintings focused on the subjectivity embedded in each authorial act, and offers an approach that transfers well to the interpretation of experience of other media, including that of the city as a whole.89Favro, 1999–2000; see also the essays in Clarke and Nevola, 2013a. Furthermore, the analysis of the ‘meaning and experience’ of urban space has an established place in contemporary urban-design practice: more than half a century ago, in the ground-breaking Image of the City, the town planner Kevin Lynch used interview-based analysis of contemporary cities to understand people’s experiences of the urban and their reception of city form.90Lynch, 1960. More recently, various studies have explored the potential of phenomenological approaches to urban space and the senses.91Zardini, 2005. These studies usefully combine with the highly influential work that Henri Lefebvre and others developed around the concept of urban space and how it is socially constructed with particular meanings, collectively defined or hegemonically imposed.92Lefebvre, 1991; see also de Certeau, 1984; Weigel, 2009, esp. p. 190. For the ‘spatial turn’ in history, see Cosgrove, 2004.

Historians are increasingly interested in looking at the experience of urban contexts in the past, and a large body of subjective evidence can be used to create an ‘experiential’ sense of the city and of urban space.93For an example of how experience and localised rituals shaped perceptions of Florence, see Clarke and Nevola, 2013a; Crum and Paoletti, 2006; Laitinen and Cohen, 2008b. Lefebvre’s view that space is produced by the interaction of people and place assigns a more than passive force to place, such that significant sites in cities can be claimed to have a kind of agency that enhances actions played out in them.94For an application of this process to the ringhiera of the Palazzo della Signoria, see Milner, 2006. However, the focus of the ‘spatial turn’, has tended to be more on the actors and deeds played out in social space, than on the physical context that provides the ‘stage’ for such actions.95Cosgrove, 2004, pp. 57–8. Similarly, while Richard Trexler stated that ‘social spaces are central to the formation, expression and modification of individual and group identities’, historians have focused more on the people (individuals and groups) and much less on the spaces themselves.96Trexler, 1985, p. 4. In fact, an engagement with the tangible, physical aspects of urban space and the social actors that perform in it reveals the street to be a public arena of performance, where the ‘social construction’ of space operates: here, streets emerge as physical places that enable, and indeed enhance, myriad everyday performances of identity formation.97Ibid., p. 16. Streets, in such a view, are more than ‘things’: they are carefully fashioned spaces that result from the negotiated relations between public and private ownership and the everyday and exceptional events that take place in them. Streets are also repositories of collective memories and rituals, and as such become imprinted with meanings that outlast the lives of individual actors on the urban stage.98This key aspect is highlighted in Kostof, 1992, pp. 189–243, esp. 194–208.

We turn now, therefore, to a view of the street as a collective expression of life in the city. As has been noted above, the pubblica via was a constant point of reference in archival descriptions of property, which indicated quite simply that a building faced the street on one or more of its boundaries. In this legal or bureaucratic context, the term pubblica indicates a binary distinction between public and private property; the street was a public space, and, as such, one that government institutions sought to protect, define and, where appropriate, improve.99Friedman, 1992, pp. 70–73; Kostof, 1992, p. 191. However, this polarised opposition between public and private is one that is called into question by research showing far more fluid arrangements between the space of the street and the built spaces that connect to it, especially in relation to day-to-day patterns of use.100The accommodation between public and private interests is a central theme of Nevola, 2007; for a broad discussion of the public/private debate, see Laitinen and Cohen, 2008a; see also Cohen and Cohen, 2001–2.

Such ambiguities of use abound. Perhaps most obviously, buildings with public functions provided permeable boundaries between interior and exterior space. Thus, for instance, churches were open to the street for extended periods of the day, allowing such a degree of free movement that city statues and legal measures often extended to their interiors, legislating against such practices as carrying weapons, gambling, soliciting for sex and urinating.101For instance see Zdekauer, 1888 (III.10); see Bruzelius, 2014, pp. 107–35. Conversely, many churches actively addressed the street or piazza onto which they faced, appropriating those spaces for such occasions as the delivery of sermon cycles, the celebration of religious services on major feast days and the performance of other ritual events when the interior space of the church was insufficient to accommodate crowds of participants.102Bruzelius, 2014, pp. 124–33. Outdoor pulpits and altars, such as Donatello and Michelozzo’s pulpit on the cathedral at Prato (fig. 44), are physical markers of what were certainly widespread practices that blurred the boundaries between the church interior and urban public space. As has been frequently noted, such practices (more even than the physical marks that document them) had the effect of sacralising areas of the city, extending the reach of a church or monastery to a loosely defined catchment area around it. Small piazzas, a widening in the street, or the location of a church at an intersection are all ways that urban form shows an accommodation between built structures and the spatial practices inscribed on them. On occasion, these practices led to untraditional solutions, as at San Domenico Maggiore in Naples, where the main piazza is behind the church’s apse, and the pulpit is raised up on a site that evidently afforded greater visibility and access than was possible on the front of the church.103Ibid., pp. 129–31.

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Description: Outdoor pulpit, on the south-west corner of the cathedral of Santo Stefano by...

44. Michelozzo and Donatello, outdoor pulpit, 1433–8, on the south-west corner of the cathedral of Santo Stefano, Prato. From this vantage point the preacher could address crowds gathered in the piazza del Duomo.

Sacred space was by no means confined within the walls of churches; a lasting trace of the informal and pervasive network of early modern devotion can be seen in countless street shrines, many of which still survive in cities throughout the peninsula (see Chapter 5). Furthermore, just as legislation was passed to control inappropriate behaviour within the sacred precincts of churches, quite complex legislative measures sought to delimit ‘safe zones’ around the sites of religious houses, especially nunneries, to protect conventual communities from ‘contamination’ by the deviant and immoral behaviour of prostitutes and their clients.104Discussed in Chapter 3. That religion and the sacred extended well beyond the walls of local parish churches and the monumental façades of cathedrals and mendicant churches is not at all surprising, and is repeatedly reaffirmed in textual and visual sources that document the widely distributed nature of the city’s devotional life. The contemporary urban settings of so many religious images from the fifteenth and sixteenth century attest to the sacralisation of public space, as artists and their patrons envisioned Old and New Testament narratives, as well as stories from the lives of saints, taking place in the familiar environments of their own cities.105From an extensive literature, see Fortini Brown, 1988; Lillie, 2014. While, on the one hand, these images appear consciously to appropriate religious narratives in order to make them more present to contemporary viewers, on the other they also worked to reinforce the sacred as a seamless extension of the everyday life of the city. In so doing, images of this sort offer a pictorial gloss on the rituals that were repeatedly enacted in urban spaces, in accordance with the annual cycle of the Christian liturgical calendar.106Muir, 1997, pp. 52–80.

Just as the sacred percolated out of religious buildings to spread through much of the urban environment, so too, in a similar way, parts of the city were invested with the meanings associated with its principal secular institutions. Political meaning invariably permeated central squares, communicated visually through the monumental architecture of city halls and the civic iconography of heraldic emblems and sculptures. In Florence this manifestation took shape on the piazza della Signoria, where a designated raised dais (ringhiera) runs along the main façade of the city hall, the Palazzo delle Signoria, from where numerous aspects of the city’s political life were performed in public for citizens to see, hear and witness (fig. 45).107Milner, 2000; Milner, 2006; Trachtenberg, 1997, pp. 87–147. In the absence of government officials at the ringhiera, this quasi-stage was embellished with sculptures of the city’s civic symbols, including the Marzocco (a lion holding a shield emblazoned with a lily) and, by 1504, Michelangelo’s marble sculpture of David.108Johnson, 2000; Milner, 2006, pp. 99ff. A similar model was exported to the city’s subject towns, where central urban space, monumental architecture and public sculpture served to articulate Florentine dominion – as, for instance, in the central square of the Florentine new town of San Giovanni Valdarno (fig. 46).109Friedman, 1988.

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Description: Confirmation of the Rule, detail by Ghirlandaio, Domenico

45. The ringhiera (raised dais) on the façade of the Palazzo della Signoria, piazza della Signoria, Florence, detail from Domenico Ghirlandaio, Confirmation of the Rule, 1483–5, fresco, Sassetti chapel, Santa Trinità, Florence.

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Description: Palazzo Pretorio (now Palazzo d’Arnolfo) by Arnolfo di Cambio

46. Palazzo Pretorio (now Palazzo d’Arnolfo) on the central piazza (now piazza Cavour), San Giovanni Valdarno, near Florence.

Comparable arrangements were adopted in cities throughout Italy. In Siena, the central piazza del Campo – which also doubled as the main market square – was dominated by the city hall (Palazzo Pubblico) and decorated with civic symbols, including the balzana (a black-and-white shield) and the she-wolf, which recalled the city’s foundation legend linked to that of Rome; it was also the site of a chapel dedicated to Siena’s principal patron, the Virgin Mary.110Nevola, 2007, pp. 106ff., 140–42. These symbols were exported to its dominions: for instance, in the small south Tuscan town of Montepescali, in 1468, the artist Francesco Alfei painted ‘a lion [symbol of the popular government] and the balzana above the city gates’ and ‘a beautiful and dignified she-wolf between these two symbols and another above the entrance to the city hall’.111ASS, Concistoro, 2125, fol. 93 (June 1468); see also Nevola, 2007, pp. 140–42. Throughout the Venetian state, the paired column arrangement adopted for the piazzetta that runs along the façade of the ducal palace, between the lagoon and San Marco, was replicated, with versions that retained the pre-eminent Venetian symbol of the winged lion of St Mark, but replaced the early patron St Theodore with locally appropriate patron saints.112For the piazzetta columns, see Fortini Brown, 1997, pp. 18–19. So, for instance, on the main piazza at Vicenza, St Mark is paired with Christ the Redeemer (fig. 47), while at Bassano he appears with St Bassianus and in Ravenna with St Apollinaris (fig. 48).

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Description: Piazza dei Signori by Unknown

47. Piazza dei Signori, Vicenza, with statues of the lion of St Mark and Christ the Redeemer set on columns.

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Description: Piazza del Popolo by Unknown

48. Piazza del Popolo, Ravenna, with statues of St Apollinaris (left) and St Vitalis (right), which replaced an original statue of the lion of St Mark in front of the Palazzo Comunale.

These carefully planned articulations of civic power projected politics onto the space of the piazza, where the repeated action of government left a permanent deposit or trace on the built urban fabric. On occasion, the centralised spatial practices that shaped these monumental spaces might be overturned, as the wider citizen community assumed an active role in the dialogue of government. Thus, for instance, in Florence at public meetings (parlamenti), when important decisions for the polity were taken, the entire citizen electorate was invited to the piazza to cast a yes/no vote.113See, for instance, Strocchia, 2006, p. 59; for earlier examples of the use of the parlamento (by the Ciompi among others), see Milner, 2000, pp. 64ff. As various contemporary commentators noted, allowing the public voice to be freely heard on the piazza was understood as a populist move that could quite easily be orchestrated to destabilise the status quo.114For examples of contestation and protest functioning as a trigger to destabilise established regimes, see Milner, 2006, pp. 95–9. A comparable dynamic was at play on other occasions, such as the famous Ciompi revolt of 1378, or the bread riots of 1497, when the cries for bread (‘Pane! Pane!’) turned into cries for a return of the Medici to power (‘Palle! Palle!’), so that the piazza became the pre-eminent stage for popular protest.115For multiple examples of ‘Palle!’ as a political cry, see Landucci, 1985; for documents relating to the 1378 grain riot, see Cohn, 2004, pp. 124–5.

In fact, the public spaces of the streets, and especially central squares, were a primary destination for rioting groups, for whom occupying the piazza was a means of contesting government authority. Numerous cases of workers’ and peasants’ riots documented throughout the latter half of the fourteenth century targeted the central squares of cities across Italy.116Cohn, 2004. When the wool workers rioted in Perugia in 1371, the unrest ‘began in the [main] square’, while during a peasant revolt in Parma in 1385 ‘the armed crowd invaded the city and went to the town square searching to kill the tax collectors.’117Ibid., pp. 132 (citing the chronicle of Donato di Neri), 360 (from the account of Conforto da Costozza).

Such a pattern continued into subsequent centuries. In Bologna in 1513, after the death of Pope Julius II, a crowd of citizens attacked the bronze statue that he had had erected on the city’s central piazza, dismembered it and gave it a ritual beating as they paraded it through the streets; in this case, a powerful symbol of papal authority became the eloquent vehicle for expressing popular unrest and relief that his pontificate was at an end.118Condivi, 1998, p. 29; see also von Moos, 1978. In fact, Bologna provides a rich body of examples of the active use of the city’s principal public spaces – in themselves, expressions of the changing regimes that controlled the city – as sites of resistance and contention. Put to these uses, the public spaces of the street, and especially the city’s principal piazza, were invested with political meaning that was widely understood, and the acts of contestation or revolt committed in such locations took on a symbolic value as a challenge to the established order.119Rospocher, 2015.

In no way exhaustive, these examples drawn from the political and religious life of cities show that the boundaries between public and private space were porous. Religious ceremonies, as also government decision-making and civic pageants, regularly took place outside the buildings that were designed for them, and numerous architectural features are a testament to this. A similar case can be made concerning commercial and industrial zones within cities, and, indeed, local residential enclaves.120Both types of location are discussed further in Chapter 4. Throughout the city, as is widely documented, ritual actions performed in the streets regularly served to give a visual presence to individuals and groups on the ‘stage’ of public space, as government officials and church hierarchies, but also guilds, confraternities, local parish groups, family clans and powerful individuals vied for visibility. Parts of the city were invested with stronger associations as sites of local devotion, political arenas, zones of trade, or residential districts, though these often overlapped; architecture and, to an extent, urban design provide the visible traces of these associations, which were lived out on a daily basis in the spatial practices of movement through the complex and overlapping meanings of the urban environment. Moreover, all the bodily senses were implicated in the complex semiotics of the public realm. The foregoing discussion has sought to draw out the relationship between built spaces and the associations they had with a variety of socio-cultural encounters, suggesting that to walk through a city was to traverse an environment that gave visual definition to the domains of work, trade, prayer, politics, sociability and the domestic.

This layered urban experience might primarily be navigated by sight, but was of course also affected by the other senses, including sound and smell. It is impossible to escape the conclusion that the early modern city was redolent with strong odours, by-products of various industries but first and foremost caused by human and animal excrement.121Smell has received little scholarly attention, but see Wheeler, 2006; see also Biow, 2006. For 19th-century literature regarding hygiene and sewerage, see Corbin, 1986. Smell, like sound, could overcome hard physical architectural boundaries, inevitably crossing the porous edges between public space and the interior of buildings.122On such permeable boundaries, see Cohen and Cohen, 2001–2, pp. 61–84. Contemporary understanding of disease associated poor air quality with ill health, thus making bad smell into an important environmental factor in the design of cities.123Lindemann, 1999, pp. 161ff.; Park, 1992, pp. 85–6. Writing about Siena in his treatise on architecture, Leon Battista Alberti reported that:

the sanitation of Siena in Tuscany is poor, because there are no drains. As a result, not only does the whole town stink at the beginning and end of the night watch, when the refuse receptacles are emptied out of the windows, but during the day as well, it is filthy and offensively vaporous.124Alberti, 1991, p. 113 (Book IV, ch. 7).

The account appears in a discussion of drains, in which Alberti described ancient Roman drains as the ‘most astonishing’ of the city’s public works, but offered no modern parallels.125Ibid., p. 111. Instead he described the widespread modern use of ‘subsidence drains’ (cesspits). The fact that he pinpointed Siena in his comments about waste management by night soil – the practice of emptying waste onto the street at night – may well in part have been motivated by his adherence to traditional Florentine antagonism: the practice was by no means restricted to Siena but was widespread throughout Italy.126For general considerations, see Greci, 1990. He may also have been echoing the overblown claims of Leonardo Bruni in his Laudatio Florentinae urbis (‘Panegyric of the city of Florence’; c. 1403–4), who maintained that the city’s streets were both clean and dry:

what is more marvellous in a populous city than never to have to worry about filth in the streets? Moreover, however big a rainstorm, it cannot prevent you walking through the city with dry feet, since almost before it falls, the water is taken away by appropriately placed gutters.127Quoted in Biow, 2006, p. 83.

Sanitation was a vexed problem in most urban centres during the pre-modern period, and while legislative measures attempted to limit the insanitary disposal of waste to the night-time, the crude humour of novella literature from Boccaccio onwards underlines the inadequacy of legislation in this regard.128Mucciarelli, 2000, pp. 36–40; see also Park, 1992, pp. 85–6; Thorndike, 1928. See also, on night work for waste removal in cities (though examples are rather later), Ekirch, 2005, pp. 165–6. For instance, in a story from the Decameron, Andreuccio of Perugia visited Naples to purchase horses, and was lured into a trap by a cunning prostitute by the name of Fiordaliso, who took him home with her to steal his money. During the night, in the intimacy of the bedroom, Andreuccio stepped out of the room to relieve himself. As Boccaccio explains, the privy ‘was above a narrow back-alley, as is often found between two houses, bridged by two planks with a seat on top’, so that waste accumulated below. A loose plank saw Andreuccio fall into the open-air sewer, while Fiordaliso helped herself to his money.129Boccaccio, Decameron, Book II, ch. 5; discussed in Atkinson, 2016a, pp. 181–2. The fact that the story of Andreuccio takes these rudimentary domestic sanitary arrangements for granted suggests that they were common, which seems to be corroborated by statute provisions regarding waste removal, as well as architects’ proposals for better infrastructure well into the sixteenth century. In Venice, for example, in spite of laws and officials to police them, excrement (scoaze) was regularly thrown out into the streets and canals, causing great inconvenience; one late sixteenth-century account suggested that only a third of the city’s streets were passable, and that pedestrians had to hitch up their clothes to avoid them dragging in effluent.130For records of the health commissioners and Cornelio Sozzini’s summary of the conditions of the streets, see Wheeler, 2006, pp. 36–7.

Francesco di Giorgio Martini’s treatise on architecture offers the longest and perhaps the only extensive treatment of latrines in the fifteenth-century treatise literature, providing what amounts to a subsection of a chapter on their placement, orientation and design. Although quite extensive, his comments are somewhat circumspect and suggest a degree of embarrassment in dealing with the subject – indeed, he notes that ‘it is dishonourable to discuss these matters’!131In relation to the stepped design of his latrine, see Martini, 1967, vol. 2, p. 336; for comparison, see Corbin, 1986. It is also curious that he does not engage with the wider implications of plumbing for such facilities. Instead, what he describes is a self-contained system, with a latrine linked by a pipe to what is almost certainly a private underground cesspit, the so-called pozzo nero (‘black well’). Francesco describes an ideal pyramidal form for such waste pits, suggesting they should preferably be lined with a sand bed, ‘as a result of which the urine, a powerful cause of putrefaction, will be drawn in, and the solid matter will remain without liquid and be less corrupted’.132Martini, 1967, vol. 2, pp. 336–7.

These comments suggest some of the reasons why organic waste was perceived as a problem – namely, that ‘vapours’ exhaled by domestic waste were injurious to health on a wider scale. As has been noted by most scholars of hygiene and health in the public realm for this period, there was a widespread association of bad smells with contagion and illness, which was supported by the Hippocratic texts.133Jenner, 2004, pp. 284–6. Inglis, 2006, pp. 109–11, suggests that pre-modern sensibilities were not affected by bad smells, although this seems a reductive view, intended to explain the concerns of modernity. See also Cavallo and Storey, 2013, pp. 70–112. Francesco’s remarks appear to corroborate the practice, which had become widespread by the sixteenth century, of storing excrement in cesspits created in the yards or gardens behind houses, rather than disposing of it directly onto the street. In Florence, for instance, the chronic overfilling of these pits, which were rarely emptied on account of the cost involved, became the subject of public-health enquiries by the provveditori alla sanità in 1622 and again in 1630, when there were major outbreaks of plague.134For the classic study of these surveys, see Cipolla, 1976; Cipolla, 1986; see also Eckstein, 2016; Henderson, 2010. Francesco di Giorgio’s treatise seems, then, to document a widespread practice by which domestic latrines were connected to isolated cisterns or cesspits, though he proposed various possible design features intended to limit or diffuse the stench that they produced – for example, by connecting them to exhalation pipes sited on rooftops.

Stench was evidently a widespread issue in the early modern city, and besides the management of human waste there were attempts from at least the fourteenth century to banish industries that produced bad odours from the central city streets.135For butchers, see Costantini, 2016. Butchers, tanners and fullers, among others, were repeatedly targeted by regulations intended to control the spread of disease; the imposition of zoning requirements sought to remove such unhealthy trades from city centres, but were also seemingly motivated by aesthetic considerations aimed at improving urban decorum.136For a view of public health impacting on urban design and aesthetics, see Geltner, 2012. Such measures literally pushed undesirable professions to the city’s edges, while at the same time encouraging the clustering of luxury retailers along the city’s main arteries.137For butchers in Siena, see Costantini, 2016; Nevola, 2007, pp. 97–8; for Venice, see Wheeler, 2006, pp. 29–30, 37. In Siena, a long campaign was mounted by government officials against butchers operating along the city’s central streets; a series of government decisions from the late 1450s document the bid to ban them from central locations, which eventually led to their removal to purpose-built premises in the valley of Fontebranda (fig. 49).138For additional details and sources, see Nevola, 2007, pp. 97–8. Adverse comments by visitors to the city seem to have acted as a spur to government policies, as the butchers were required to move specifically because ‘our city is much criticised by courtiers and other foreigners who are in the city [. . .] because they [the butchers] are in the main streets.’139Ibid., citing ASS, Statuto di Siena, 25, fol. 330 (21 March 1460). The commune was concerned that Siena was being compared unfavourably with other ‘well-governed cities’, such as Mantua, so in 1460 a general ban was issued on butchers exercising their trade on the main streets.140Ibid.

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Description: Purpose-built premises for the butchers of Siena by Unknown

49. Purpose-built premises for the butchers of Siena, in the Fontebranda area, away from the city centre.

Likewise, in Venice repeated efforts were made to clean up the piazzetta and piazza San Marco, by clearing away butchers, cheese sellers and hostelries as part of Jacopo Sansovino’s large-scale renovations that made way for the city mint (the Zecca) and the library (1536–7); the project also included the removal of latrines from the base of the columns on the piazza, which Giorgio Vasari remarked were ‘something foul and shameful for the dignity of the palace and the public square, as well as for foreigners who coming to Venice by way of San Giorgio saw all that filthiness first’.141Wheeler, 2006, p. 29 (citing Vasari’s account of the life of Jacopo Sansovino). For the redevelopment by Sansovino, which provided new premises for these trades, see Howard, 1975, pp. 11–14; Howard, 2002, pp. 172–3; see also Fenlon, 2008, pp. 111–17; Morresi, 1999, pp. 191–213. Later improvements sought to remove the meat market and beccheria (‘slaughterhouse’) to the far western end of the piazza, near Santa Maria del Broglio.142Wheeler, 2006, p. 30. A mid-sixteenth century view of the area by Jost Amman (fig. 50) provides an animated view of the partially improved area, still dominated, however, by traders (butchers and sausage sellers on the left), while a hostelry fills the corner between the Zecca and the incomplete Marciana Library.

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Description: Procession of the Doge to the Bucintoro on Ascension Day, with a View of Venice,...

50. Traders’ stalls in the centre of Venice, detail from Jost Amman, Procession of the Doge to the Bucintoro on Ascension Day, with a View of Venice, ca. 1565, 1697, woodcut, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

Human and animal waste, as well as the noxious by-products of industrial processes, contaminated the air of early modern cities, and appear to have formed a pervasive layer of substrate on the streets.143In addition to human waste, animals moving through the city – either for transport or on their way to market – also produced waste. For the problems of horse dung in 19th-century cities, see Inglis, 2006; Jenner, 2003. Unpleasant odours must have permeated the walls of churches, offices and homes, especially considering that cesspits stored effluents practically within the close confines of the house. Unsurprisingly, perhaps, various strategies were developed to combat these smells and insanitary foul vapours, by overpowering them with more pleasant odours. Incense and other perfumed products were widely used in religious ceremonies, and in Florence and Venice there is extensive evidence of house fumigation using pungent perfumed products such as pitch, turpentine, storax or myrrh to counteract stench (as regulated and enforced in Venice in 1576), while cheaper solutions involved dousing walls with vinegar.144Calvi, 1989, pp. 155 ff.; Wheeler, 2006, pp. 31, 34–6. There is also considerable material evidence – particularly among the elites – of personal perfumes worn about the body in increasingly elaborate purpose-made jewellery and accessories.145Welch, 2011; Wheeler, 2009. Whether through the sensory and olfactory reappropriation of the building’s interior, or the creation of personal, portable perfumed micro-environments, these measures sought to reaffirm the hard edges of built architecture that separated the outdoor public realm of the street from the interior spaces of buildings.

Smell is only one of several sensory factors that blur the boundaries between indoor and outdoor spaces, but it provides a helpful measure of the porosity that belies solid architectural edges. Sound, of course, is another of the senses that can overcome the boundaries of walls, doors and windows, and the noise of the street also penetrated into buildings (as is explored further in Part 2). Whether the institutional marking of time by the complex chiming of bells that rang out over the city, or the trumpets and announcements of town criers, or the informal sonic networks created around street corners and market stalls where gossip flourished, or indeed the subversive cries of protest and uprisings, sounds made outside in the street filtered into homes and churches.146The most detailed study of sound in the city is Atkinson, 2016b; see also Dennis, 2008–9, pp. 9, 13–15; for more specific discussion of the scampanata rituals in Florence, see Colleran, 2009.

Everyday rituals and public space

It is difficult to reassemble the sensory environment of the pre-modern city, the sounds and smells, as well as the day-to-day interactions that animated movement in and around public spaces. As we saw in Chapter 1, early modern public spaces can be understood as ceremonial sites, as theatres of civic and religious rituals, or as locations controlled and regulated by the authorities. Those same public spaces were also an arena for the expression of everyday interactions, not all of them structured by centralising authorities. A host of everyday rituals animated the streets and piazzas, from the quotidian movements around market areas to the devotional activities of confraternal groups that marked localised sacred networks on the urban fabric, or indeed the itineraries of workers between their homes and their places of work. Citizens appropriated spaces and public rituals, and re-elaborated them in autonomous and unforeseen ways to create ‘practiced spaces’ (de Certeau), defined by the everyday social activities associated with gender, work, family and religion enacted by individuals and groups, and to make the public spaces of early modernity ‘spaces in motion’.147For the production of meaning through motion in space, see Lefebvre, 1991, p. 171.

At the other end of the spectrum from commonplace actions and interactions, structured by the built environment, the streets were the site of rituals and performances, both religious and civic. A quite remarkable type of ritual event was a kind of spontaneous demonstration that took place around the time of earthquakes, which deployed the city’s public spaces as the natural setting for mass gatherings. In contrast to the tightly regulated ceremonial rituals that shaped such events as triumphal entries or papal processions, the collective reaction to these sudden destructive events showcases the appropriation of public spaces by the community for its own purposes.

On 4 December 1456, a cold, wet winter night, disaster struck in Naples, as a devastating earthquake – possibly the strongest earthquake of the second millennium in the Mediterranean area – hit the city and most of the towns and villages of the Regno (the Aragonese Kingdom of Naples), razing to the ground hundreds of churches and houses and killing at least 12,000 people.148The most complete published account is Figliuolo, 1989. For an online database and maps, see E. Guidoboni et al., Catalogo dei forti terremoti in Italia (461 a.C.– 1997), 2018, online at http://storing.ingv.it/cfti/cfti5/, with a detailed entry on 1456, at http://storing.ingv.it/cfti/cfti5/quake.php?42811IT# (accessed 9 August 2017). The first shock lasted about two minutes, and was followed by aftershocks in the following days, one of them, on 30 December, especially significant. As a major political centre, the capital of the Regno was home to numerous merchants and ambassadors, whose correspondence provides a major source documenting the events.149Figliuolo, 1989; vol. 2 includes documents as an appendix.

Among these, the most detailed account is that of Doctor Bindo de Bindis, the Sienese ambassador to the King of Naples, who wrote a long report of the earthquake in a letter of 7 December to the Sienese Signoria.150Ibid., vol. 2, pp. 9–12 (the letter was widely copied and appears in various collections); all subsequent quotations attributed to Bindo come from the same source. His letter begins:

My Lords, on the 4th of this month [December], after the XI hour had rung out, an earthquake came, which lasted for the space of a tenth of an hour, or perhaps more; and it was so great that all this land is ruined, starting from the temples of God [. . .]

and ends:

It seems here that at night and during the day you hear nothing but the noise of people shouting: ‘misericordia’. Considering how many bells there are in this city, there are only seven that can still ring. From Naples, on the 7th day of December 1456.

It is notable that bells, their sound and the marking of time, play a significant part in Bindo’s account, signalling the hour after which the earthquake took place, and suggesting a measure for the length of the quake, while the silencing of the city’s bells is the last point he makes before signing off. The regular ringing of bells formed part of the complex soundscape of the pre-modern urban environment, as bells rang out at distinct hours from specific sites across the city; the breaking of this stable and regular pattern of soundmarks was shocking, remarkable and worthy of note.151For a careful analysis of bells in Florence, see Atkinson, 2016b, pp. 69 ff., in which the pattern of bell-ringing is described as a sonic regime. So too was the fact that in a city of countless churches only seven functioning bells remained when the disaster was over. The regular cadence of bells, marking the rhythm of the day, and the secular and religious activities that they signalled gave way to the constant noise of the anguished cries of the population, begging for divine forgiveness. These crowds of desperate people are the subject of another passage in Bindo’s account:

Truly it seemed that the sky had opened up to hear the bitter, harsh and tearful cries, at which point they all commended themselves to God, believing they were about to die; it was cause for sincere sympathy to see friars, priests, women, girls and boys of all ages, throughout the day going about the city crying in a disorderly line, just like little sheep without a shepherd harried by wolves: ‘Misericordia, misericordia’; and the noise was so great that it seemed the stones were crying.

Bindo provides a vivid and harrowing description of a frightened and forlorn population walking through the city in an impromptu, ragged procession; their wailing cries, echoing through the mangled ruins of buildings, help to explain the unusual simile of the stones themselves crying out.

Much of the rest of Bindo’s letter dwells on the material damage to the city’s buildings, though he makes a brief reference to news coming in from the rest of the Regno of the death and destruction that had struck a huge geographical area. He starts by describing the damage wreaked on the city’s many churches, beginning with ‘Sant’Agostino, a noble church, larger than ours [in Siena]’, remarking that it has been damaged so extensively that ‘no one dared go inside, nor the friars to celebrate [the liturgy]’. He then goes on to list the city’s main churches – San Giovanni Maggiore, San Lorenzo, the cathedral and so on – summarising in a final sentence the fate of ‘many other parish churches, all of them open to the sky and wrecked, for which it would take too long to write about them one by one’. After the churches, he notes damage to secular buildings, stating that ‘an infinite number of palaces and houses were ruined to their foundations, so that it is impossible to walk or even pass along many streets, on account of the piles of rubble.’ He reports that, on account of the continued risk from collapsing buildings during the aftershocks, as many as 4,500 tents, pavilions and other temporary shelters had been erected outside the city walls – more than any besieging army would need – where people afraid of returning to their homes were taking shelter.

The Sienese ambassador’s account is echoed by other diplomatic correspondence, which adopts a similar format. Most accounts focus first on the devastation of churches and religious complexes, moving on to discuss secular buildings and then to the population’s response to events.152For a discussion of the wider context of responses to disaster in early modern Italy see Nevola, 2015, with earlier bibliography. In a long account, Giannozzo Manetti, ambassador to the Florentine republic, reported on massive damage, and commented that spontaneous processions, involving large numbers of people, were taking place to ward off any further quakes: ‘as a remedy not for the past scourge – as many have suggested – which is incalculable and cannot be remedied, but on account of the fear of another similar incident, each and everyone is assiduously participating in processions day and night’.153Figliuolo, 1989, vol. 2, pp.17–19. Manetti also compiled a treatise, in 1457, as a result of what he observed in Naples: Manetti, 1983. It is clear from his report that people of all ages were taking part in the processions, many of them barefoot, while some wore penitential clothing, and others quite simply sackcloth or rags as they walked the streets, wailing.154Figliuolo, 1989, vol. 1, p. 158. Similarly, the Venetian ambassador Bertucci Contarini, reported that ‘day and night there are processions, with all people as well as children barefoot and pleading for mercy.’155Ibid., vol. 2, p. 23. Outside the walls, frightened residents sought safety in temporary shelters, while, inside the walls, Naples’ main squares at San Giovanni in Carbonara and the market were filled with tents, where people took refuge in open spaces away from buildings; the wealthy banker Filippo Strozzi fled from his palace and sought safety in one of his galleys in the harbour.156Ibid., vol. 1, pp. 155–6.

While the Naples earthquake of 1456 was exceptional for its violence, and the scale of destruction that it caused, Italy has always been subject to seismic activity and the incidence of earthquakes during the Renaissance period provides an interesting measure of how populations responded to such risks.157See, for example, Guidoboni, 1989; Guidoboni and Comastri, 2005, with earlier bibliography; and Guidoboni et al., Catalogo dei forti terremoti in Italia, online at http://storing.ingv.it/cfti/cfti5/. As emerges clearly in the accounts from Naples, penitential processions were the primary form of response, and drew widespread participation. No accounts indicate specific routes for these processions, which instead are described as filling the city and its streets – those same spaces that were largely occupied by the rubble of collapsed buildings. As such, processions appear to have reclaimed the city and reasserted the pubblica via as a safe and devotional space. Furthermore, as a direct consequence of the diplomatic correspondence from Naples in 1456, processions were held in numerous Italian cities to invoke protection and prevention – for example, in various cities in the Papal States, including Perugia, Bologna and Rome.158Figliuolo, 1989, vol. 1, pp. 172–4. In Bologna, indeed, an extraordinary Lent was imposed: butchers and numerous other shops were closed and prostitutes prevented from working.159Ibid., p. 174, refers to Borselli, 1922, p. 93: ‘Meretrices ad concubitum nullum admittebant.’

Collective ritual actions were a common response to strong earthquakes.160For a table drawn from information collected in Guidoboni and Comastri, 2005, see Nevola 2015, p. 66. Processions and penitential activity predominantly occurred in the public space of streets, and were intended to overturn the divine judgment of which, loosely speaking, such events were widely seen as portents.161Niccoli, 1987, pp. 185–216, comments on the relationship between prophecy, floods and the socio-political construction of disasters; see also the more general comments in Cohen and Cohen, 2001, pp. 25–42. The practice of holding public processions for these purposes is considered in Muir, 1997, pp. 232–9. So then, during the earthquake swarm that struck Aquila around 1462, the aftershocks were marked by processions night and day, and the bishop Amico Agnifili ordered a temporary altar to be raised on the square in front of the ruined cathedral for mass to be said and regular devotions to be observed; bells were used to call citizens to make repeated prayers to the Virgin.162Figliuolo, 1989, vol. 1, p. 159; Guidoboni and Comastri, 2005. In Siena, processions were a primary response in the summer of 1467, when a series of earthquakes struck the city, causing considerable damage and forcing many to leave their homes for temporary shelter in the city’s piazzas, or tents and pavilions outside the walls.163Nevola, 2014, p. 100; Nevola, 2015, pp. 59–61. A remarkable painting by Francesco di Giorgio Martini depicts the city ‘at the time of the earthquakes’ (AL TENPO DE TREMUOTI; fig. 51); undamaged in the centre ground, the city appears under the protection of the Virgin Mary, while in the foreground the population finds refuge in hastily erected temporary shelters.164Syson et al., 2007, pp. 88–91, with earlier bibliography. As local chroniclers Tommaso Fecini and Allegretto Allegretti noted, numerous processions around the city followed the event. So then, while practical measures such as evacuation were adopted, the Sienese response to the events of summer 1467 was mainly located in the sacred and enacted through devotional practices. These accorded with the primary motives widely identified for the events: as Allegretti reported, many ‘say that our sins are to blame, which is more to be believed’.165Allegretti, 1733, col. 772.

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Description: The Madonna Protecting Siena at the Time of the Earthquakes by Francesco di Giorgio...

51. Francesco di Giorgio Martini, The Madonna Protecting Siena at the Time of the Earthquakes, 1467, tempera on panel, Museo delle Biccherne, n. 34, Archivio di Stato, Siena.

Francesco di Giorgio’s image, and the response to earthquake that it records is not unique. A natural parallel with it can be seen in Francesco Francia’s fresco Madonna of the Earthquake, painted on the wall of the Cappella degli Anziani in the Palazzo Comunale of Bologna, in the wake of the earthquake swarm that hit the city from December 1504 (see fig. 6).166Negro and Roio, 1998, pp. 81, 157–58; Williamson, 1907, pp. 88–90. While the damage caused to the urban fabric by this extremely severe sequence was considerable, and has, indeed, been credited with contributing to the fall of the signoria of the Bentivoglio, Francia chose to show the city undamaged, or in its pre-quake state, with its tall towers prominent on the skyline.167Guidoboni et al., Catalogo dei forti terremoti in Italia, online at http://storing.ingv.it/cfti/cfti5/, record 188. See also Boschi and Guidoboni, 2003, pp. 55–83; Clarke, 1999, pp. 409–11. The brief Latin inscription at the base of the fresco makes it clear that this is an ex voto, and that the Virgin’s intercession on behalf of the city was renewed through it.168Negro and Roio, 1998, p. 158: V.M.D./ TERREMOTU. CUNCTA. DIRRUENTE. / DICT. ET. COS. / URBE. SERVATA. / DEIPARAE. VIRGINIS. IMAGINEM. / POSUERUNT.

Of the same date, and related to the same events, is a crude ink drawing, showing Bologna at the time of the earthquakes, as the text on the right makes clear (fig. 52).169Boschi and Guidoboni, 2003, pp. 60–61; my thanks to Emanuela Guidoboni for generously bringing this image to my attention, the dating of which remains problematic. Here, it is not at all obvious whether we are seeing the city before or after the events: no buildings reveal structural damage (though this was, in fact, widespread), the towers are not truncated, and their inclination survives to modern times, so does not seem to suggest that we are watching them as they fall. In the foreground, however, filling the space between the walls and houses, what appear to be tents can be seen, revealing that the Bolognesi had left their homes for temporary shelters, in spite of the cold winter conditions.170For people moving out of houses into temporary structures, see ibid., pp. 81–2. Also clearly visible in the foreground are groups of figures, many of them bearing crosses and perhaps a rosary, kneeling in prayer, and facing in the same direction; a mass of chronicles and documents confirm that a primary response to the disaster took the form of devout, penitential processions.171Ibid., pp. 55–60; of three documents revealing institutional responses, one established a series of processions, and the other two called for restoration work to damaged buildings (one specifically relating to churches). To the left of the sheet (the direction in which the figures face) are the arms of Bologna above the legend GLORIOSISIMAE VIRGINI NUNCIATAE. MDV (‘Most glorious Annunciate Virgin, 1505’), proclaiming the city’s devotional response to crisis, and the fact that the people specifically addressed the Virgin as their intercessionary divine patron.

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Description: The Earthquake of 1505 by Unknown

52. Unknown draughtsman, The Earthquake of 1505, pen and ink drawing, Palazzo Comunale, Bologna.

These images and the ceremonial activities that they record – ‘visual prayers’, as Michael Bury has described them – document the means by which urban communities reacted to collective threats to the polity.172Bury, 1998, p. 86. For a more extensive discussion of these image types, see Nevola, 2015. They reveal a collective response, sometimes mediated by a specific confraternity, but often commissioned by the local government administration on behalf of the urban community as a whole. The representation of the city in these and many other images was a common feature, used to signal the collective nature of the threat, and in so doing to invoke the aid of the patron saint, who is commonly shown carrying a model of the city. Notwithstanding the inclusion of this attribute, however, such images tend to represent a physical and spiritual distinction between a city and its heavenly intercessor; after all, the prevalent interpretation of such cataclysmic events was that they represented divine judgment, so it was appropriate to indicate submission and penitential separation from the divine. That such was the case is brought home in comments relating to an earthquake that struck Bologna on 20 December 1455, of which the diarist and architect Gaspare Nadi reported:

the tower of the church of the Santa Maria del Monte collapsed, and many chimneys fell down in the territory of Bologna, where there are some very well-built houses, and the vault [chiave] of the Ospedale della Morte broke, and many pregnant women miscarried. [The earthquakes] were so powerful that I think that, but for the holy bodies in the churches in this land, it would certainly have been destroyed [se non fose per li chuorpi santi che sono in le chiessie de questa tera certamente seria aporfondada]. The Lord be praised, always.173Guidoboni and Comastri, 2005, p. 620.

Reference to the miraculous survival of people, buildings and sacred objects abound in the chronicles and diary accounts of events of this sort. However, this particular passage eloquently engages the reader in the powerful physical and metaphorical linkage that existed between buildings, physical bodies and protective ‘holy bodies’. In this instance, it is interesting to note that comments on the quality of buildings in the area serve to reinforce the severity of the damage done, while it is surely significant that the devastating collapse of the tower at the shrine of the Madonna del Monte (which housed a miraculous image of the Virgin) is juxtaposed with the multiple miscarriages suffered by the women of Bologna. The coincidence that it is the vault of the Ospedale della Morte (‘hospital of death’) that is destroyed is again richly evocative, while, most importantly, Nadi notes that the city has been protected from further damage by the ‘holy bodies’, the relics of the saints, preserved in the city’s churches.

Experience and embodiment are here presented through the eyes of a contemporary viewer, in an account that reveals the seamless way in which individuals and communities responded to major events of this sort, by describing physical experiences that were inextricably bound up with devotion and belief.174For a discussion of the growing place of embodiment in art history, see Freedberg, 2009; also helpful is Crowther, 2001. Just as the ‘holy bodies’ saved living bodies and protected built walls, so too their painted ‘visual prayers’ served a similar purpose. These paintings capture the embodied survival of the experiences that they depict and the processes urban communities participated in at such times of crisis.

1 Manetti, 1887, p. 43, Eng. trans. and commentary in Martines, 1994, pp. 171–212, 213–41. »

2 For Grasso’s return home and the reference to the bells, see Manetti, 1887, p. 39. »

3 Ibid., p. 43 (my trans.). A further stage of the trick, involving Donatello and Brunelleschi, was played out in the cathedral; it amounts to a variation on the same theme of identity theft. »

4 For male sociability, see, for instance, Weissman, 1982; Rosenthal, 2010. »

5 For bells in Florence, see Atkinson, 2016b. »

6 See, for example, Martines, 1994, pp. 213–41, with the central analysis that ‘place and identity went together’ (p. 234); Ruggiero, 2006, with a focus on virtu; Tafuri, 1992, pp. 1–3, 21–3. See also Groebner, 2007, pp. 18–22. »

7 See Chapter 6. On lineage and property in Tuscany, see English, 1984; Lansing, 1991. For a detailed example from Rome, see Ajello Mahler, 2012. »

8 Friedman, 1992. »

9 They are discussed in detail in Chapter 1. »

10 Rykwert, 1978, p. 15. »

11 Cosgrove, 2004; Shortell and Brown, 2016, p. 5. For foundational work, see de Certeau, 1984, pp. 91–109; Lefebvre, 1991. »

12 Atkinson, 2019; de Vivo, 2016; Eckstein, 2016. »

13 Following the influential observations of Benjamin, 1997, and Benjamin, 1999; de Vivo, 2016, pp. 140–41. »

14 Atkinson, 2011. »

15 Poggiali, 1815, vol. 1, p. 215 (novella II). »

16 Ibid. »

17 For the wider context of the story in relation to Siena’s trade and pilgrimage, see Nevola, 2007; on food hawkers, see Tuliani, 2007; for the seasonal traffic of pilgrims, see Piccinni, 2003. »

18 For provocative discussion of this subject, see Jütte, 2014. »

19 Zanchettin, 2005b. »

20 Fortini Brown, 1990, p. 140. »

21 Malara, 1996, pp. 29–73; for discussion of the marble transported from the Alps for the construction of the cathedral, see Welch, 1995, pp. 78–81. For images recording the now largely lost network of canals, see Buccellati and Grandi, 1987; Finazzer Flory, 2007. »

22 For disputes in the 1390s regarding marble-supply problems for the cathedral, see Welch, 1995, p. 79; for Filippo Maria Visconti’s expansion of the network and preference for travel by water, see Malara, 1996, pp. 61–3. »

23 Pesci, Ugolini and Venturi, 2005, pp. 157–79; Tuohy, 1996, pp. 154–60 (focusing on the elaborate barges (bucintori) prepared for the dukes). »

24 Piccolomini, 1984, vol. 1, pp. 411–13; see also Pesci, Ugolini and Venturi, 2005, p. 158. »

25 Pesci, Ugolini and Venturi, 2005, pp. 157–9. »

26 Ibid., p. 161; the 1667 Madonna may well simply have replaced an earlier image. »

27 Complete statutes from the 15th century are published in Palermo, 1979, pp. 269ff. »

28 Zanchettin, 2005a, pp. 131–2; see also Marder, 1980, pp. 29–31. For the concentration of prostitution in the area around the Mausoleum of Augustus, see Chapter 3. »

29 Palermo, 1979, 1463 statutes, rubric XI, p. 294 (noting that access to and from Ripetta was signalled by the third ring of the bell of the church of Santa Maria in Torre), rubric XXVIII, p. 299. »

30 Zanchettin, 2005a, p. 130 n. 25. »

31 Crime and taverns are discussed further in Chapter 4; see Salzberg, 2019. »

32 Friedman, 1992, pp. 72ff., though the legislation was regularly ignored and properly enforced only by the 15th century (see also Chapter 1). The Latin root for strada (‘street’) is sternere, ‘to pave’. »

33 From a vast literature, key texts that outline an experiential approach to street life are Benjamin, 1999; de Certeau, 1984, pp. 91–109; Gehl, 1987; Merleau-Ponty, 2002; Pallasmaa, 2005. »

34 Numerous such accounts survive; for a selection in English, see Dean, 2000, pp. 5–62. For how literary accounts were informed by the city experienced through the act of walking, see Atkinson, 2016a. »

35 On foreign travellers, see Nevola, Bardati and Renzulli, 2012; for chorographic accounts, see Atkinson, 2016a, pp. 193–206, in relation to accounts by Petrarch and Flavio Biondo. »

36 De Vivo, 2016, pp. 119–21 (with map of the itinerary, fig. 1). »

37 Quoted in ibid., p. 123. »

38 See, for instance, Fortini Brown, 2004; see also Savoy, 2012. »

39 De Vivo, 2016, p. 124; Lowe, 2013, pp. 430–33; Romano, 1994, pp. 368–9. »

40 Romano, 1994, p. 360; for discussion of the favoured status of black gondoliers, see Lowe, 2013. »

41 Romano, 1994, p. 362. »

42 Ibid., p. 363. »

43 Galleria dell’Academia, Venice. »

44 This is, of course, a central factor in Venice’s architectural history. It is not discussed further here, but see Howard, 2002, pp. 43–54; the point is developed extensively in Savoy, 2012. »

45 De Vivo, 2016, p. 124, with reference to Sanudo’s account; Zanelli, 1997. »

46 See, for example, Crouzet-Pavan, 1992, pp. 265–89; Howard, 2002, pp. 48–9. »

47 Malara, 1996, p. 70 (quoting Milan, Biblioteca Ambrosiana, Codex Atlanticus, B, fol. 37v). »

48 Bowd, 2010, p. 90. »

49 Klapisch-Zuber, 1995, p. 12 n. 5; see also Bellosi and Haines, 1999, p. 83. The panel was sold at Christie’s, London, 6 July 2017, lot 13. »

50 Bowd, 2010, p. 90; the legend is also referred to by Dante in Purgatorio, canto X, 73–93. »

51 Hunt, 2014, pp. 177–81; see also Lotz, 1973. »

52 Hunt, 2014, pp. 180–81. »

53 On prostitutes using carriages, see Storey, 2008. »

54 Lotz, 1973; the classic example of architecture responding to the demands of carriage traffic is the reordering by Pietro da Cortona of the small piazza in front of Santa Maria della Pace to provide a oneway system for carriages to move through the space. »

55 Hunt, 2014, pp. 182ff. »

56 For evidence of the considerable carting costs (often outweighing the purchase cost) of stone for the cathedral of Siena, see AOMS, 917 (1059), 1481–95, ‘Spese per la cavatura e trasporto di pietra’, and other volumes in the series; see also Aronow, 1985. »

57 Jacobs, 2013, pp. 334. »

58 Ibid., pp. 33–5, 135–7; Rowland, 2001, pp. 151–2; Silver and Rowland, 2019. »

59 Sacchetti, 1970, pp. 32–3 (novella XII). »

60 Bernardino da Siena, 1989, vol. 2, pp. 1040–41. »

61 On pathways and movement in Venice, see Fortini Brown, 1990, pp. 136–87; Howard, 1993–4. »

62 Urban and architectural historians have mined this story extensively; see, recently, Atkinson, 2016a, pp. 188–93. »

63 Classic studies remain Kent, 1971; Kent and Kent, 1982. »

64 The various sites are discussed in more detail in Part 2. »

65 Cohn, 1980, pp. 124ff. »

66 Calabi, 2001, pp. 46–65; Cohn, 1980; de Vivo, 2016, p. 122. »

67 See Chapter 4; see also Calabi, 1997; Calabi, 2004; Welch, 2005. »

68 Cavallo, 2006; Spilner, 1987. »

69 Catoni and Piccinni, 1984; Jamison, 2016. The major change in practice is that while self-assessment declarations formed the basis of the catasto or lira in the 15th century, by the following century the data were collected by officials. »

70 The classic analysis of the 1427 Florentine catasto is Herlihy and Klapisch Zuber, 1985. A language-based approach to similar sources, which explores their significance for geography and space, is outlined in Smail, 2000. »

71 Eckstein, 2016; Eckstein, 2018. »

72 Dean, 2000, pp. 11–16. »

73 ASS, Lira, 185, fol. 301. »

74 Niall Atkinson proposes to create a map of the 1427 catasto, based on the internal evidence of the portate. For an early instance (1525) of systematic door-to-door surveys along a fixed route, see Eckstein, 2018, n. 84. »

75 ASF, 325, Decima Granducale, 3780–84 (volume 3784 refers only to shops). For an overview of the innovative and ongoing digital reconstruction of the survey using GIS, see Terpstra and Rose, 2013, online at http://decima-map.net/ (accessed 14 June 2016). »

76 Eckstein, 2016, pp. 12ff. More broadly on Florentine plague censuses, see Cipolla, 1976; Cipolla 1986. »

77 Eckstein, 2016, pp. 18–19. »

78 A recent flourishing of scholarly interest in spatial and digital approaches to mapping urban space has been spearheaded by examples drawn from Florence; for a collection of essays that sets out this approach, see Terpstra and Rose, 2016. »

79 For an example of how notarial documents might be used to reconstruct a property block, see de Courcey-Bayley, 1998. »

80 For further discussion of these offices, see Chapter 1. »

81 Friedman, 2012. »

82 Ibid., p. 283. »

83 Ibid., pp. 290ff.; Friedman observes that only very few streets on Leonardo Bufalini’s 1560 map are named. »

84 For five elements of ‘urban image-ability’, see Lynch, 1960, pp. 46–90; the subject is discussed further at the beginning of Chapter 4. »

85 See, for example, Ballon and Friedman, 2007. »

86 The distinction is one of Lefebvre’s key concepts, and he adduces evidence of the transformation from 16th-century Florence; Lefebvre, 1991, pp. 38–9, 80, 128ff. »

87 Baxandall, 1972; for a useful discussion of the book and its impact, see Hills, 2011; for correction to its male-merchant bias, see Randolph, 2004. »

88 For further assessment of Baxandall’s method, see Rubin, 2007. »

89 Favro, 1999–2000; see also the essays in Clarke and Nevola, 2013a. »

90 Lynch, 1960. »

91 Zardini, 2005. »

92 Lefebvre, 1991; see also de Certeau, 1984; Weigel, 2009, esp. p. 190. For the ‘spatial turn’ in history, see Cosgrove, 2004. »

93 For an example of how experience and localised rituals shaped perceptions of Florence, see Clarke and Nevola, 2013a; Crum and Paoletti, 2006; Laitinen and Cohen, 2008b. »

94 For an application of this process to the ringhiera of the Palazzo della Signoria, see Milner, 2006. »

95 Cosgrove, 2004, pp. 57–8. »

96 Trexler, 1985, p. 4. »

97 Ibid., p. 16. »

98 This key aspect is highlighted in Kostof, 1992, pp. 189–243, esp. 194–208. »

99 Friedman, 1992, pp. 70–73; Kostof, 1992, p. 191. »

100 The accommodation between public and private interests is a central theme of Nevola, 2007; for a broad discussion of the public/private debate, see Laitinen and Cohen, 2008a; see also Cohen and Cohen, 2001–2. »

101 For instance see Zdekauer, 1888 (III.10); see Bruzelius, 2014, pp. 107–35. »

102 Bruzelius, 2014, pp. 124–33. »

103 Ibid., pp. 129–31. »

104 Discussed in Chapter 3. »

105 From an extensive literature, see Fortini Brown, 1988; Lillie, 2014. »

106 Muir, 1997, pp. 52–80. »

107 Milner, 2000; Milner, 2006; Trachtenberg, 1997, pp. 87–147. »

108 Johnson, 2000; Milner, 2006, pp. 99ff. »

109 Friedman, 1988. »

110 Nevola, 2007, pp. 106ff., 140–42. »

111 ASS, Concistoro, 2125, fol. 93 (June 1468); see also Nevola, 2007, pp. 140–42. »

112 For the piazzetta columns, see Fortini Brown, 1997, pp. 18–19. »

113 See, for instance, Strocchia, 2006, p. 59; for earlier examples of the use of the parlamento (by the Ciompi among others), see Milner, 2000, pp. 64ff. »

114 For examples of contestation and protest functioning as a trigger to destabilise established regimes, see Milner, 2006, pp. 95–9. »

115 For multiple examples of ‘Palle!’ as a political cry, see Landucci, 1985; for documents relating to the 1378 grain riot, see Cohn, 2004, pp. 124–5. »

116 Cohn, 2004. »

117 Ibid., pp. 132 (citing the chronicle of Donato di Neri), 360 (from the account of Conforto da Costozza). »

118 Condivi, 1998, p. 29; see also von Moos, 1978. »

119 Rospocher, 2015. »

120 Both types of location are discussed further in Chapter 4. »

121 Smell has received little scholarly attention, but see Wheeler, 2006; see also Biow, 2006. For 19th-century literature regarding hygiene and sewerage, see Corbin, 1986. »

122 On such permeable boundaries, see Cohen and Cohen, 2001–2, pp. 61–84. »

123 Lindemann, 1999, pp. 161ff.; Park, 1992, pp. 85–6. »

124 Alberti, 1991, p. 113 (Book IV, ch. 7). »

125 Ibid., p. 111. »

126 For general considerations, see Greci, 1990. »

127 Quoted in Biow, 2006, p. 83. »

128 Mucciarelli, 2000, pp. 36–40; see also Park, 1992, pp. 85–6; Thorndike, 1928. See also, on night work for waste removal in cities (though examples are rather later), Ekirch, 2005, pp. 165–6. »

129 Boccaccio, Decameron, Book II, ch. 5; discussed in Atkinson, 2016a, pp. 181–2. »

130 For records of the health commissioners and Cornelio Sozzini’s summary of the conditions of the streets, see Wheeler, 2006, pp. 36–7. »

131 In relation to the stepped design of his latrine, see Martini, 1967, vol. 2, p. 336; for comparison, see Corbin, 1986. »

132 Martini, 1967, vol. 2, pp. 336–7. »

133 Jenner, 2004, pp. 284–6. Inglis, 2006, pp. 109–11, suggests that pre-modern sensibilities were not affected by bad smells, although this seems a reductive view, intended to explain the concerns of modernity. See also Cavallo and Storey, 2013, pp. 70–112. »

134 For the classic study of these surveys, see Cipolla, 1976; Cipolla, 1986; see also Eckstein, 2016; Henderson, 2010. »

135 For butchers, see Costantini, 2016. »

136 For a view of public health impacting on urban design and aesthetics, see Geltner, 2012. »

137 For butchers in Siena, see Costantini, 2016; Nevola, 2007, pp. 97–8; for Venice, see Wheeler, 2006, pp. 29–30, 37. »

138 For additional details and sources, see Nevola, 2007, pp. 97–8. »

139 Ibid., citing ASS, Statuto di Siena, 25, fol. 330 (21 March 1460). »

140 Ibid. »

141 Wheeler, 2006, p. 29 (citing Vasari’s account of the life of Jacopo Sansovino). For the redevelopment by Sansovino, which provided new premises for these trades, see Howard, 1975, pp. 11–14; Howard, 2002, pp. 172–3; see also Fenlon, 2008, pp. 111–17; Morresi, 1999, pp. 191–213. »

142 Wheeler, 2006, p. 30. »

143 In addition to human waste, animals moving through the city – either for transport or on their way to market – also produced waste. For the problems of horse dung in 19th-century cities, see Inglis, 2006; Jenner, 2003. »

144 Calvi, 1989, pp. 155 ff.; Wheeler, 2006, pp. 31, 34–6. »

145 Welch, 2011; Wheeler, 2009. »

146 The most detailed study of sound in the city is Atkinson, 2016b; see also Dennis, 2008–9, pp. 9, 13–15; for more specific discussion of the scampanata rituals in Florence, see Colleran, 2009. »

147 For the production of meaning through motion in space, see Lefebvre, 1991, p. 171. »

148 The most complete published account is Figliuolo, 1989. For an online database and maps, see E. Guidoboni et al., Catalogo dei forti terremoti in Italia (461 a.C.– 1997), 2018, online at http://storing.ingv.it/cfti/cfti5/, with a detailed entry on 1456, at http://storing.ingv.it/cfti/cfti5/quake.php?42811IT# (accessed 9 August 2017). »

149 Figliuolo, 1989; vol. 2 includes documents as an appendix. »

150 Ibid., vol. 2, pp. 9–12 (the letter was widely copied and appears in various collections); all subsequent quotations attributed to Bindo come from the same source. »

151 For a careful analysis of bells in Florence, see Atkinson, 2016b, pp. 69 ff., in which the pattern of bell-ringing is described as a sonic regime. »

152 For a discussion of the wider context of responses to disaster in early modern Italy see Nevola, 2015, with earlier bibliography. »

153 Figliuolo, 1989, vol. 2, pp.17–19. Manetti also compiled a treatise, in 1457, as a result of what he observed in Naples: Manetti, 1983. »

154 Figliuolo, 1989, vol. 1, p. 158. »

155 Ibid., vol. 2, p. 23. »

156 Ibid., vol. 1, pp. 155–6. »

157 See, for example, Guidoboni, 1989; Guidoboni and Comastri, 2005, with earlier bibliography; and Guidoboni et al., Catalogo dei forti terremoti in Italia, online at http://storing.ingv.it/cfti/cfti5/. »

158 Figliuolo, 1989, vol. 1, pp. 172–4. »

159 Ibid., p. 174, refers to Borselli, 1922, p. 93: ‘Meretrices ad concubitum nullum admittebant.’ »

160 For a table drawn from information collected in Guidoboni and Comastri, 2005, see Nevola 2015, p. 66. »

161 Niccoli, 1987, pp. 185–216, comments on the relationship between prophecy, floods and the socio-political construction of disasters; see also the more general comments in Cohen and Cohen, 2001, pp. 25–42. The practice of holding public processions for these purposes is considered in Muir, 1997, pp. 232–9. »

162 Figliuolo, 1989, vol. 1, p. 159; Guidoboni and Comastri, 2005. »

163 Nevola, 2014, p. 100; Nevola, 2015, pp. 59–61. »

164 Syson et al., 2007, pp. 88–91, with earlier bibliography. »

165 Allegretti, 1733, col. 772. »

166 Negro and Roio, 1998, pp. 81, 157–58; Williamson, 1907, pp. 88–90. »

167 Guidoboni et al., Catalogo dei forti terremoti in Italia, online at http://storing.ingv.it/cfti/cfti5/, record 188. See also Boschi and Guidoboni, 2003, pp. 55–83; Clarke, 1999, pp. 409–11. »

168 Negro and Roio, 1998, p. 158: V.M.D./ TERREMOTU. CUNCTA. DIRRUENTE. / DICT. ET. COS. / URBE. SERVATA. / DEIPARAE. VIRGINIS. IMAGINEM. / POSUERUNT. »

169 Boschi and Guidoboni, 2003, pp. 60–61; my thanks to Emanuela Guidoboni for generously bringing this image to my attention, the dating of which remains problematic. »

170 For people moving out of houses into temporary structures, see ibid., pp. 81–2. »

171 Ibid., pp. 55–60; of three documents revealing institutional responses, one established a series of processions, and the other two called for restoration work to damaged buildings (one specifically relating to churches). »

172 Bury, 1998, p. 86. For a more extensive discussion of these image types, see Nevola, 2015. »

173 Guidoboni and Comastri, 2005, p. 620. »

174 For a discussion of the growing place of embodiment in art history, see Freedberg, 2009; also helpful is Crowther, 2001. »

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