Carampane

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With Carampane in is Venice part of the island Rialto designated in which from about 1422 mainly prostitutes lived and worked. In that year they were forced to move from Castelletto, established around 1360, to their new quarters in the municipality of San Matteo, on the edge of the Rialto Island, where the economic center was and where most of the non-Venetians went.

Pattern of city use

Rio San Cassan with Ponte delle Tette
The Ponte delle Tette
45 ° 26 ′ 19.8 ″  N , 12 ° 19 ′ 51.4 ″  E

The cities of the Renaissance increasingly tended to reinterpret and use urban space. One often thought in dichotomies, ie something was inside or outside the walls, this or that side of a river, or it was public or private, sacred or profane, morally high or low. In addition, it was recognized that the streets, alleys and canals, the churches and other buildings were highly manipulable and could be reinterpreted for certain purposes. For example, streets were decorated on certain occasions in such a way that they gave the appearance of the sacred, they became viae sacrae . When prisoners were convicted, they were ostentatiously taken through the streets to purify their offenses, so that they became viae purgatoriae . After all, it was the immediate access to the surrounding area and then to every part of the city that distinguished the Italian Renaissance city. The executive bodies were the numerous offices that were set up for this purpose. Long neglected was the fact that certain places were assigned to women and others to men. Places of prostitution, as morally reprehensible but unavoidable and useful for the maintenance of the family, were at the intersection of these classifications of space, morality and gender.

Approved places in this sense were the Castelletto, the Rialto Bridge, the Fondamenta delle Tette and the Carampane. At the Fondamenta delle Tette, where there was also a calle and a ponte, i.e. an alley and a bridge next to the promenade of a canal, the prostitutes were allowed to present their breasts uncovered to attract customers.

In the 16th century there was a need to prevent the spread of syphilis ( mal francese ), a school of thought that had already been shaped by the fear of the plague of 1347/48 . Eventually, arguments of order, fiscal, and justice came into play.

Regulatory measures

In 1460 there were a number of regulatory measures. T. to protect the physical integrity, but also to protect against exploitation. The Council of Ten stipulated that no owner of a tavern, restaurant or bathhouse was allowed to take more than two ducats per month from a whore for wine, food and room rent. They were not allowed to leave the island of Rialto during the day or at night without the permission of the heads of the sestieri , except on Saturdays - with a fine of 10 lire and 10 lashes. Likewise, they were only allowed into the brothel if they had reported to the heads of the sestiere beforehand, with a fine of 10 lire and 15 lashes. They were also not allowed to be used as a guarantee for anything, or to be lent money at their expense. Should a whore take a room opposite the church of San Matteo or at the former Scuola di San Gottardo , this should be walled up. Pimps and initiators ("lenones et ruffiani") were banned from doing their job because they were too lazy to make a living from their own work, otherwise they were threatened with banishment for two years. Apparently the regulations and penalties that had been laid down in 1423 had not always been applied. The matrona of the respective brothel, however, collected and managed all income and distributed it to the whores every month.

In 1539, the Provveditori alla Sanità , the health overseers, enforced that prostitutes who had lived in Venice for less than two years had to leave the city. This decision was related to the fear that prostitutes, displaced from Milan because of the plague , would come to Venice. Alongside them, the government threw 4,000 to 5,000 beggars out of town. In addition, the remaining whores were not allowed to live near holy places, especially not in the vicinity of churches, and they were also not allowed to enter them if women of good and respectable status were there. In addition, they were no longer allowed to employ women who were younger than 30 years of age; Servants traveling around were no longer allowed to spend the night with them, but had to live in a house designated for this very purpose, which was to be set up in every community. The fact that the same decision was repeated in 1572 proves that the demand to expel all whores who had lived in Venice for less than two years was not permanently enforceable. However, the period has been extended from two to five years. In addition, the emphasis now shifted to protecting young people from women and at the same time the government tried to prevent women from dressing like men and from wearing short-haired, mushroom-like hairstyles that partially obscured the face. The hair should be laid back to show the women as they believed God created them. The gondoliers were also strictly prohibited from driving the whores around on the canals.

End of the limitation to the carampane

But in the course of the 16th century it became less and less possible to limit prostitution to the narrow area around the Carampane. Although the Senate tried to prevent visitors to St. Mark's Square from being addressed , at least during Carnival and the Festa della Sensa this was a hopeless endeavor. The women often stood together in groups and addressed every potential customer. This massive occurrence has even been suspected as a reason why it was not fashionable to stroll through the streets in Venice for a long time. Even if you had agreed with a gondolier that you only wanted to go out to relax ( a spasso ), you were often driven to a courtesan.

At that time, the concept of the carampane, i.e. concentrating the whores in one quarter, had long since failed and was abandoned in 1498. Marin Sanudo mentions in his diaries that there were exactly 11,643 whores in the city in 1519, although this may be an exaggeration. On February 21, 1543, a senate ruling complained that there were an excessive number of whores in the city and that they could be found in every alley. In addition, they are so well dressed that they are easily mistaken for the other women. In order to at least differentiate them from women of higher class, they were forbidden to wear gold, silver and silk, silk was only allowed to be part of the hood. They were not allowed to wear cadenelle (necklaces) or rings, with or without gemstones. In addition, these provisions should apply even if they were not in Venice at all. In their houses they were only allowed to have modest furniture and only fabrics from Bergamo and Brescia without decoration. On this occasion an attempt was made to differentiate the meretrices from the other women. Accordingly, it was either unmarried women who had business and intercourse ( comertio et praticha ) with one or more men, or married women who did not live with their husbands, but who also maintained comertio .

Courtesans and whores

In addition to the fact that prostitution could never be limited to the carampane, the courtesan was valued in contrast to the women there. In 1535 the Catalogo di tutte le principal et più honorate cortigiane di Venezia appeared , which named names, prices, qualities and matchmakers. The women of this reputation sat models for famous painters and came to the churches in this detour. However, this mythicization could not remove the contradiction to the permanent endangerment from the authorities, defamation, illness and unsafe aging. The price differences stated in the Catalogo were in a ratio of 1 to 30.

The top group and the best paid for gifts were the cortigiane oneste , the honorable courtesans who often only had one suitor, followed by the less respected cortigiane da candela or the cortigiane da lume . They ran their businesses in the back rooms of shops and were dependent on more than one suitor. In 1524, for the first time, a legal text explicitly differentiated between courtesans and whores ( cortigiane vs. putane over meretrice ). Prostitutes who raised girls and adopted them often secured their retirement years by letting them work for them.

Towards the end of the Republic of Venice, the Carampane was a less closed area, and in 1776 the Rio de le Carampane was filled in. The Campiello del Bonomo is located there today .

literature

  • Federica Bovio: Donne di malaffare, la prostituzione a Venezia fino alla caduta della Repubblica , tesi di laurea, Università Ca 'Foscari, Venice 2016 ( online ).
  • Antonio Barzaghi: Donne o cortigiane? La prostituzione a Venezia. Documenti di costume dal XVI al XVIII secolo , Venice 1980.
  • Giovanni Battista de Lorenzi: Leggi e memorie venete sulla prostituzione fino alla caduta della Repubblica , Venice 1884.
  • Doretta Davanzo Poli: Il gioco dell'amore. Le cortigiane di Venezia dal Trecento al Settecento , Milan: Berenice 1990.
  • Lord Orford: Leggi e memorie venete sulla prostituzione fino alla caduta della republica , Venice 1870–1872.

Remarks

  1. ↑ These phenomena examined in detail Edward Muir and Ronald Weissman: Social and Symbolic Places in Renaissance Venice and Florence. In: The Power of Place: Bringing Together Geographical and Social Imaginations , eds. John A. Agnew, James S. Duncan, Boston: Unwin Hyman, 1989.
  2. ^ Dennis Romano: Gender and the Urban Geography of Renaissance Venice. In: Journal of Social History 23.2 (1989) pp. 339-353.
  3. ↑ According to Tassinis Curiosità veneziane , this name goes back to a Tetta family who acquired citizenship in 1636 and owned a house there in 1718. She came from Šibenik (Sebenico).
  4. ↑ Girolamo Fracastoro dealt with syphilis in Venice : De contagione et contagiosis morbis , Venice 1546.
  5. ↑ This and the following from: David Sanderson Chambers, Brian Pullan (Eds.): Venice. A Documentary History, 1450-1630 , Renaissance Society of America, University of Toronto Press, 2001, Reprinted 2004, pp. 120-129.
  6. ^ Iwan Bloch : Die Prostitution , Vol. 1, L. Marcus, 1912, p. 790.
  7. ^ After Elizabeth Pavan : Police des mœurs, société et politique à Venise à la fin du Moyen Age , in: Revue historique 264,2 (1980) 241–288, here: p. 256.
  8. ↑ Such a catalog was never officially published, but it was forbidden to print anything like this, as Elisabeth Pavan was able to show on the basis of a trial file (This: Police des mœurs, société et politique à Venise à la fin du Moyen Age. In: Revue Historique 264,2 (1980) pp. 241-288, here: p. 241). This file of the trial of a Hieronimo Calepin Stampador, which is in the Venice State Archives, dates from 1561. Nevertheless, it was secretly printed and circulated under the table.

Coordinates: 45 ° 26 ′ 19.6 ″  N , 12 ° 19 ′ 54.2 ″  E