ancient cities

encode specific relations and notions of the
Venetian city and state. Looking at the Piazza San
Marco as an example of an early planned
Renaissance setting, Denis Cosgrove argues one
can see the elements of the republican polity
mapped out in the urban fabric. There are axes of
the sacred (the basilica) and secular (the flanking
arcades of the procuratie), the monarchical (the
doge’s palace), the aristocratic and republican, as
well as oppositions of sea and land—the last
articulated most obviously in the annual ritual
wedding of Venice with the sea. This constellation
of symbolic sites was itself cast within a wider triangular
pattern of locations surrounding the doge’s
palace and the basilica that contrasted San Marco
as the site of order and ritual with the Arsenal as a
place of technology and the Rialto as dominated
by a commercial logic.
The Venetian symbolic landscape created sites
of heightened charge and significance for different
people and occasions. For example, the gendering
of social and spatial worlds is illustrated in
Venetian legal judgments. The work of Dennis
Romano suggests that legal space involved both
managing the moral distance of good and bad
and also the use of locations whose symbolic
meaning addressed the crime or the victim.
Punishment might involve the exclusion of offenders
from both direct and indirect access to political
power by excluding them physically from the
places around San Marco where that power was
exercised, as in a judgment by the Council of Ten
dated 1323, which forbade three noblemen from
going to San Marco and Rialto and further prohibited
them from using the main commercial
street, the Merceriu, or any of the other main
thoroughfares leading to San Marco and Rialto.
Alternately, a cheating merchant would be
denounced in the Rialto, as when in 1349, for
example, the Council of Forty passed judgment
on a goldsmith who had defrauded a client. His
dishonesty was announced in the street of the
goldsmiths and at the public scales at Rialto.
When the courts sought to rescue a defamed
woman’s honor, it had the slanderer taken and
castigated during Mass in her own and neighboring
parish churches. These judgments then reveal
the authorities’ tacit map of different communities
and audiences associated with different parts
of the city.
Social Divisions
Venice, Italy
953
Space was thus used to express social differences
but also to sustain and enforce social segregation.
One can see this social division in the separate
scale of a female geography of parish, neighborhood,
and home that was enforced by the double
veiling of women beyond those confines—women
could meet in the campo to see neighbors, do the
shopping, visit the local church, and perform any
other domestic errands, but beyond the parish,
they had to be under the double veiling of costume
and felze (an awning on a gondola).
This regulation and marking of space by gender
can also be seen in concerns over gossip, with the
city authorities concerned over the movement of
the word on the street. The symbolic geography of
Venice located public speech in San Marco and the
information of commerce in the Rialto; it confined
feminized gossip to the neighborhoods. In practice,
however, this division is less clear because male
gossip was a crucial, if sometimes destabilizing
part of politics, especially around the broglio and
elections—to the extent that the state regulated
speech at these times in key locations. Moreover,
as a commercial center, the exchange of information
was crucial to the functioning of the city as a
market.
The gendering of the use of spaces in the city is
also expressed in the control of female sexuality.
Thus, respectable women would not be seen on the
Rialto because it was morally hazardous: Moneychanging
conducted there bordered on the usurious,
although this was religiously disallowed, and
the insula Rivoalti had a semiofficial designation
as the center of prostitution. The state’s presumption
was that women in known areas were prostitutes,
and prostitution was often policed by being
socially and spatially confined and controlled—
trying to spatially separate reputable and disreputable
women.
Rather than banning prostitution, the city had
always found ways to accommodate it as part of
the trade and traffic in the city, to the extent that,
in 1358, the Grand Council of Venice declared that
prostitution was “absolutely indispensable to the
world.” The registers of 1490 record more than
11,000 prostitutes in the city, and an estimate
from the patrician Marin Sanudo in the early sixteenth
century was that 10 percent of women were