Recreation in the Renaissance

Varieties of Pastimes 91
the official image of Venice. Since the participation in the battles as
combatants or spectators was tightly linked with neighbourhood identities,
and battles could easily escalate and turn into full-scale riots, the
custom could only to some extent be classifiable alongside harmless
amusements. On the other hand, it was ordinarily intended by its protagonists
as a form of recreation – in fact, it was commonly referred to
as the most popular among Venetians – and usually held on Sundays;
battles were at least to some extent staged, sometimes in agreement with
the Republic’s authorities and as a display to a princely visitor; patricians
were actively involved in taking sides, supporting their faction and
betting on the results. All these elements strongly suggest that these
social customs should be regarded, at least from some respects, as a form
of popular recreation. The fact that Davis repeatedly refers to the subject
of his book as a ‘cult’ could further alert us to the multi-faceted nature
of that tradition; but there again, we normally speak in similar terms of
modern soccer, without ceasing to consider it, after all, a sport and
leisurely entertainment. Everything considered, it could hardly be
omitted from our overview.
The Venetian ‘war’ reached its climax during the seventeenth century,
only to vanish during the following: the last large-scale bridge battle
was fought in 1705. Throughout the period, the custom underwent
some degree of a ‘civilizing process’, first by moving from the most
dangerous pointed sticks to fists, then by progressively isolating the
most violent elements and the tendency to lead to armed vendettas. 7
As well as prohibitionist legislation, it provoked discussion among
moralists, with at least a full-length printed volume devoted in the
mid-seventeenth century by a Genoese Dominican to censure the
popular tradition of battagliole. 8
That the élite were by definition a ‘leisure class’ appears evident from
some typical contemporary literature. John Florio (1553–1625), the son
of an Italian Protestant émigré in Elizabethan and Jacobean London and
a protagonist of Anglo-Italian linguistic and cultural exchanges of his
period, gives us a brilliant example in his Second Fruits. The volume
offers the English speaker one hundred pages of Italian conversation,
with translation provided on the opposite pages (a collection of six
thousand Italian proverbs, in alphabetic order, follows as an appendix).
The text is written as a dialogue between a group of gentlemen who
spend a whole day together, thus offering the reader the opportunity to
encounter a vocabulary that covers useful topics of everyday life, from
‘rising in the morning’ and ‘things belonging to the chamber and to
aparell’ to ‘going to bed, and many things thereto belonging’ (a Renais-