ancient cities

954 Venice, Italy
prostitutes. Even if an exaggeration, this suggests
the level of concern about and visibility of prostitution,
and certainly in the eighteenth century, Venice
acquired a reputation as a center of prostitution
and gambling throughout Europe. Attempts to
control and demarcate respectable and disreputable
women were ongoing, and their recurrence suggests
they were not especially successful.
Thus, prostitutes had regulations demanding a
yellow veil, and controls were placed on their clothing
to set them apart from other women. While a
Sumptuary Law of 1606 enacted that
it was a public shame that prostitutes were to be
seen in the streets and churches, and elsewhere, so
much bejewelled and well-dressed, that very often
noble ladies and women citizens, because there is
no difference in their attire from that of the
above-said women, are confused with them; not
only by foreigners, but by the inhabitants, who
are unable to tell the good from the bad . . . therefore
it is proclaimed that no prostitute may wear,
nor have on any part of her person, gold, silver or
silk, nor wear necklaces, pearls or jewelled or
plain rings, either in their ears or on their hands.
Equally specific spaces served to mark out virtue,
with convents created that again spatially
defined female virtue and where virginity was conjoined
with public honor. Rather than being centers
of religious calling, these segregated spaces
offered a place where daughters of noble families
might be ensconced so that they did not dilute family
inheritances and their sexual conduct attracted
approbation rather than shame. Houses for the
salvation of poor women were endowed by rich
patrons; the inhabitants were abjured from leaving
for fear over their spiritual health. These all formed
spatial strategies for confining, placing, and managing
women whose sexuality was seen as a threat
to the social order.
If this segregation was on gender lines, perhaps
the most famous segregation was by ethnicity.
Venice had a large Jewish population throughout
the Republic, partly associated with the money
lending and currency operations on the Rialto—
from which Christians were excluded by religious
injunctions against usury. The hypocritical and
murky situation is used by Shakespeare in his
Merchant of Venice.
The regulation of the Jewish population
involved the creation of the world’s first ghetto
when in 1516 the Council of Ten confined the
Jews in the Nuovo (New), then Vecchio (Old,
1541), then Novissimo (Newest, 1633) ghettos in
Canareggio. These three courts housed up to
5,000 people and had buildings up to nine floors
in height—making it the most densely populated
part of a densely populated city. When outside the
ghetto, Jews were required to wear a yellow
bareta (hat), like prostitutes, and were further
subject to a curfew after dark, save for doctors of
medicine (whose liberty was later revoked). The
ghetto was locked and guarded by Christian
doorkeepers for which the city made the residents
of the ghetto pay.
There were further ordinances that made sex
between Christians and Jews a crime of the flesh
alongside prostitution, and in both cases, the state
had a pattern of social and spatial containment of
figures seen as marginal or threatening to the
social order.
Emergence as a Tourist City
The celebrity of the thus policed vice industries,
principally, prostitution and gambling, began to
turn Venice into a tourist center by the eighteenth
century. Its development of the Lido cemented this
in the nineteenth century, and Venice has become
one of the archetypal tourist historic cities. It now
makes a living from visitors who consume the
legacy of the serenissima. Although in the early
Renaissance, the population of Venice had reached
120,000, this has now fallen to 60,000 (actually
living in the city), of whom more than 25 percent
are older than 65. Against this, are annual visitor
numbers of around 8 million, of whom two-thirds
are day trippers, the so-called Turisti mordi e fuggi
(“eat and run” tourists), and the majority of visitor
activity is confined to a triangle formed by the
Piazza San Marco, the Rialto, and the Accademia
bridge. The negotiation of crowds of (lost) visitors
in the tangle of pedestrian streets has become a
major issue for residents, as has the strain on other
elements of the infrastructure and complaints
about tourists behaving inappropriately—playing
Frisbee and the like on the San Marco “beach.”
Meanwhile, street vendors (of often dubious legality),
selling souvenirs and goods (of often dubious