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Chapter 3. Surveillance and the Street: Urban Form as an Instrument of Control
Fabrizio Nevola
Description: Street Life in Renaissance Italy
Street Life in Renaissance Italy
What was life like in the streets of the Renaissance city, and how might we get a sense of the lived experiences of these remote yet familiar spaces? A good place to start is the extraordinary nine-piece panel, usually described as the Rinaldeschi altarpiece, which tells the story of a...
Author
Fabrizio Nevola
PublisherYale University Press
Copyright© 2020 Fabrizio Nevola
Related print edition pages: pp.99-129
https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00290.3
Stable URL: https://aaeportal.com/?id=-22183
Chapter subject tags:Architecture, Renaissance--ItalyFlorence (Italy)Arezzo (Italy)--HistoryPublic spaces--ItalyCity and town life--ItalyUrban ecology (Sociology)Police--ItalySiena (Italy)--History
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Chapter 3. Surveillance and the Street: Urban Form as an Instrument of Control
On 11 July 1501, as Antonio Rinaldeschi passed through the small piazza of Santa Maria [degli] Alberighi, he picked up a handful of horse (or rather donkey) shit, and when he had left the piazza and reached the narrow alley that leads to the street of Porsanpiero, he turned towards the image of Our Annunciate Lady that is painted over the side door of said church, and threw the shit at her [. . .] Antonio wasn’t seen throwing said muck at the said Annunciate, and as it pleased her that the events should be discovered, so the office of the otto came to hear about it, and so they issued a warrant for him and severe penalties for anyone who knew where he was and didn’t inform on him [. . .] and he was instantly tried by the signori otto who found him guilty, and he too considered himself to be deserving of the death penalty for such excess as he had perpetrated; and so they sentenced him to death, and he was hanged that very day from the window of the Palazzo del Capitano [Bargello], and he was left there dead, his body hanging until the following day.1Connell and Constable, 1998, p. 90, doc. 3 (Entrata, uscita, debitori, creditori e ricordanze, Berkeley, University of California, Bancroft Library, Ms. 54, fol. cxxxi recto).
What was life like in the streets of the Renaissance city, and how might we get a sense of the lived experiences of these remote yet familiar spaces? A good place to start is the extraordinary nine-piece panel, usually described as the Rinaldeschi altarpiece, which tells the story of a hapless gambler, Antonio Rinaldeschi, and his demise in Florence at beginning of the sixteenth century.2The definitive account of the Rinaldeschi case is Connell and Constable, 1998; see also Connell and Constable, 2005; Sebregondi and Parks, 2011, p. 255. For a discussion of the panel and the church, see Holmes, 2013, pp. 99–103.
Policing public space
By all accounts, Rinaldeschi was not an especially pleasant character; he accumulated considerable debts, and is reported to have beaten his father, who in turn sought to cut him out of his will, which in turn led to a drawn-out legal battle with his siblings over inheritance.3Connell and Constable, 1998, p. 62. He was a gambler, and it was this that led to the events depicted in the remarkable painting by the minor artist Filippo Dolciati, which shows scenes from the final ten days of Rinaldeschi’s life, from 11 July 1501 to the day of his execution on the feast day of Mary Magdalene, 22 July (fig. 53).
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Description: Rinaldeschi Altarpiece by Dolciati, Filippo
53. Filippo Dolciati, Rinaldeschi altarpiece, 1503, tempera on panel, Museo Stibbert, Florence.
In a sequence resembling a cartoon strip, the cautionary tale unfolds, describing Rinaldeschi’s multiple blasphemy against the Virgin Mary, following an unlucky spell of gambling, and culminating with his ultimate punishment by hanging from a window of the Bargello. At the top left, Rinaldeschi takes his leave of his gambling companions at the tavern, where their dice are left tellingly on the table; the cloak that perhaps he has lost gaming is already worn by the seated figure on the right. Rinaldeschi’s mouth is open, and he has a devil at his shoulder, suggesting that this is probably the first moment he curses the Virgin Mary. In addition to the two seated men, a small figure in the tavern doorway to the left is busy handling food, and would appear to be a direct witness to the events. This first scene is essential for setting the context of the crime. The location is unmistakable, as the tavern is identified by the fig tree visible on the back wall as the ‘Fico’ (the Fig Tree), one of the best-known taverns in central Florence, while the date is prominently inscribed on the roof tiles of the building that frames the action.4For the Fico, and tavern culture more broadly, see Rosenthal, 2015b. The next scene shows Rinaldeschi twice, both times in the company of the devil who seems to tempt him (right) to bend down and pick up a handful of dried horse manure from the street (left). The building colours and types are broadly similar to those in the first scene, so we can assume that he has not walked far from the tavern: in fact he is just around the corner in the small piazza of Santa Maria degli Alberighi. In the next scene, Rinaldeschi’s right arm is raised, the dung prominent in his hand, ready to be thrown violently at the painted image of the Annunciation of the Virgin Mary – the Madonna de’ Ricci – that adorns a side door of the church. It is significant that the defiled state of the sacred image is not shown, but only the moment immediately preceding its profanation.
In the second register, Rinaldeschi’s passion begins. The action transfers to the countryside where he has fled from justice; we see him as he tries to commit suicide (the dagger is in his hand) to escape punishment, and is restrained by the armed guard of the podestà, who have tracked him down. In the sky, tiny angels chase off the devils that have attempted to compound the sin of blasphemy with that of suicide.5The definitive work is Murray, 2000. In the next scene, Rinaldeschi is marched off to prison in the Bargello, while in the third panel he is shown behind bars in a pose of penitence, and then being taken to trial. It has rightly been argued that the iconography of this central section is heavily dependent on sacred representations of Christ’s Passion – the arrest in the Garden of Gethsemane – and the imprisonment of John the Baptist.6Connell and Constable, 1998. Indeed, a remarkable transformation occurs to Rinaldeschi as an individual, as he abandons despair and self-harm (which tempted him under the influence of the devil) and becomes contrite, as is evidenced by the full-sized angel standing behind him as he goes to face his trial.
In the third register, a visibly serene Rinaldeschi confronts his fate. He stands trial at the court of the otto di guardia, the magistracy that by this time in Florence had assumed most powers in criminal cases; the eight officials are seated in judgment, while a scribe stands behind Rinaldeschi, pen in hand to keep a record.7For the otto di guardia, see Terpstra, 2008b. By the second scene the otto have handed down their sentence of capital punishment; we see Rinaldeschi receiving the last rites in the Bargello chapel (left), and then in the company of the black-robed and hooded Compagnia dei Neri (‘Company of the Blacks’; right), the confraternity that assisted and comforted criminals being led to execution.8Terpstra, 2015a. Rinaldeschi carries his own noose wound round his arms, and his quiet composure is again rewarded by the prominent presence of an angel behind him.
The final scene of the panel shows Rinaldeschi’s hanging, directly out of a corner window on the first floor of the Bargello, where he could be seen by passers-by and assembled crowds who might have attended this brutal implementation of public justice.9For defenestration and the public performance of justice (and the recording of such events through painted images – pitture infamanti), see Edgerton, 1985, pp. 91–124, which deals only with Florence; see also Freedberg, 1989, pp. 246–63; Terry-Fritsch, 2015. To the left side of the window can be seen the top of Rinaldeschi’s head, with the noose already around his neck and tied firmly to the window colonette, as well as, below, the hanging body at the moment of the execution itself. Here, inscribed on the wall beside the hanging figure is the only authentic text in the panel except for the date shown in the first scene (all the other inscriptions are later); they are Rinaldeschi’s last words of contrition ‘Signor mio Giesu Christo, abbi miserchordia del’anima mia’ (‘My Lord Jesus Christ, have pity on my soul’). One of the Neri holds a reliquary to bless him in his final agony and Rinaldeschi has an amulet belt of corals around his waist. From the window on the right, page boys look on, while below them a final battle is played out for the soul of Rinaldeschi, with angels triumphing over devils.
As scholars have noted, at first sight Dolciati’s panel is a cautionary tale of performative justice.10Connell and Constable, 1998. Rinaldeschi’s terrible act of blasphemy and sacrilege – both spoken and physically enacted by defiling a sacred image with animal excrement – is justly and visibly punished as an example to others. Execution was only rarely applied for blasphemers in this period, and William Connell and Giles Constable have noted how unusual and extreme Rinaldeschi’s punishment was; they suggest that not only was the crime compounded by the attempted suicide but that its punishment is to be understood in the context of the populist regime that ruled Florence at this time, and the revival of Savonarolan fervour for popular devotion, which resulted in the more severe prosecution of such crimes as blasphemy, sodomy and gambling.11Ibid., pp. 77–80; for a similar argument for the prosecution of sodomy, see Rocke, 1996. However, while Rinaldeschi’s punishment is prominently shown, it is not the sole subject of the nine-scene panel; it can, in fact, be convincingly argued that the subject of Dolciati’s panel is Rinaldeschi’s redemption (as played out by the narrative of angels prevailing over devils), and, by association, the miraculous agency in this process of the very image of the Virgin that Rinaldeschi had defiled. As Connell and Constable have shown, a significant cult sprang up around the Madonna de’ Ricci, and led to the construction of an oratory around the image, abutting the church of Santa Maria degli Alberighi.12Connell and Constable, 1998, pp. 80–88; Holmes, 2013, pp. 99, 164. As such, the image itself contributed to the foundational legend of a local devotion to the Madonna, and exercised agency in the conversion of the gambler to penitent.
On account of the local significance of the events around the Rinaldeschi case and the importance they assumed for Marian devotion around Santa Maria degli Alberighi, a rich documentary trail allows a thorough reconstruction of the circumstances and effects of this gambler’s moment of blasphemous fury. However, for present purposes, it is useful to draw back from the details of the example to see what this case tells us about the public space of city streets at this period. Since the painting describes actual events in real places, we are presented with a record of the visual experience of those places, and indeed the whole story may be understood as inextricably linked with the typology of the places through which the narrative moves. We can thus observe the sequence of scenes from the small piazza (chiassolino), which accommodated the tavern of the Fico, to the narrow street by Santa Maria degli Alberighi, to the canto (‘corner’) where the Madonna de’ Ricci was painted, out to beyond the city walls, and then back into the city, where the final five scenes are all played out in and around the Bargello, the palace of justice.
Moreover, given the nature of the events that unfold in those places, the painting is a valuable document for understanding the nature of the various spaces in the city, and how each of these favoured or facilitated particular actions and behaviours. Thus, it is possible to propose a spatial interpretation of the events and how they were represented by Dolciati that parallels Connell and Constable’s symbolic reading of the three tiers of the image as showing sin (above), redemption (middle) and salvation (below). A first-level spatial reading of the narrative would contrast the urban public spaces of licence and sinful behaviour (top tier) with the middle scene of escape from the city (capture scene), circling back to urban order restored through the intervention of secular and religious authority in the self-contained space of the Bargello, the site and symbol of the Florentine judiciary. While such a reading of urban space may suggest a juxtaposition of unregulated public space and the repressive control of the Bargello, this very much misses a key point: Rinaldeschi flees the city in the fourth scene precisely because the public spaces in which he performed his sacrilegious act were so heavily regulated, controlled and policed. In the tavern scene, his two companions, as well as the boy working in the tavern, are witnesses to his actions; one of the accounts of the events even singles out a boy as having seen the act of sacrilege take place.13Connell and Constable, 1998, p. 53. Moreover, we should not overlook the fact that the image of the Virgin had agency of its own, such that the records of the shrine for the Madonna de’ Ricci specifically stated that ‘Antonio wasn’t seen by anyone throwing said muck at the said Annunciate [Virgin Mary], and as it pleased her that the events should be discovered.’14Ibid., p. 90, doc. 3.
Thus, in addition to the material witnesses in the area and the possible viewers from nearby windows (all the shutters are shown open), the key witness is shown to be the Virgin Mary herself. It is therefore more accurate to suggest that Rinaldeschi’s attempt to escape justice by leaving the city and to circumvent it by committing suicide was a recognition of the combined power of collective self-surveillance, sacred control and judicial powers exercised on public space in the city. As much as a tale of sin, redemption and salvation, this is a story that reveals the complex layering of community, devotion and authority, exercised on all urban public space in this period. It thus serves as a fitting starting point for exploring further the nature and meaning of public spaces and how everyday life was played out in them.
The spaces through which Rinaldeschi’s story moves were familiar ones: small piazzas, taverns, local churches, street shrines and street corners were among the main features of the physical space of any neighbourhood. In this instance, the area is circumscribed to a few narrow streets, a stone’s throw from Florence cathedral, and tucked behind the main east–west axis, the Corso, that cut through the heart of the city from the central market (Mercato Vecchio) area out to the east towards the hills of Settignano. This was an especially densely packed part of the city, where trade and industry jostled with places of leisure and housing, as well as – of course – monumental public and religious buildings. Away from the centre, the situation was not very different, though the urban fabric was less dense and there were fewer grand buildings; nonetheless, the neighbourhood was shaped around a similar set of key elements, which again imposed order on urban space. It was for this reason that Rinaldeschi sought to evade the controlling power of the city by escaping to the country (where he attempted suicide), only to be returned to the heart of the city, where he faced capital punishment performed in public as a cautionary execution, from a prominent window of the palace of the city judiciary.
Although the capital punishment that Rinaldeschi faced was an unusually extreme response to blasphemy, the events as they are recorded in the nine-scene panel and various documentary accounts provide a vivid illustration of how urban space was controlled through a complex interlocking system of surveillance – both secular and divine, centralised and diffused. We can observe how the Madonna’s gaze was empowered with agency and reinforced by the evidence of material witnesses, and how retribution was rapidly enacted through the city’s police and court system. Urban space is shown to have been a public arena within which public acts were seen and judged, even when they appeared to have taken place in narrow alleys hidden from the gaze of institutional authority. Although seemingly exceptional, the incident and its visual record make apparent the architectural, urbanistic, legislative and social structures that functioned to control and police behaviour in the public spaces of Renaissance cities.
The Rinaldeschi incident reveals how significant it was for events to be seen and, indeed, suggests an interesting overlap between the all-seeing eye of divine justice and the operations of the city police and legal system. Sites such as the corner window of the Bargello in Florence were prominent in the urban fabric, and thus highlighted events that were staged there, as powerfully as did the images and symbols – such as the coat of arms also shown in the painting – that were displayed for passers-by in the street to see. Such highly refined design techniques were adopted to improve the visual and communicative strategies of the key monumental buildings that formed the core of late medieval and Renaissance Florence, and it is reasonable to assume this was the case in other cities too.15Trachtenberg, 1997. Urban-scale interventions were focused as much on major public structures as on adapting the adjacent environment of streets and public spaces; and such adjustments to the cityscape were often made with the specific intention of enhancing a building’s visibility and its ability to represent with appropriate impact the institutions it housed. In turn, of course, urban-scale design and modification were a powerful expression of governmental power; as Chapter 1 showed, retroactive improvement and ex novo creation of streets was a complex process, strongly identified with a government’s authority and power.
However, it is also worth considering how the urban fabric, and the significant changes to it that were increasingly made from the fifteenth century, served to control movement through the city, and shape behaviour in public space, and how this was policed. To what extent might we see streets, especially the straightened and widened main arteries that were fashioned through significant urban-scale interventions, as having particular functions in both articulating and facilitating the exercise of government authority? Furthermore, to what extent were citizens and residents implicated in the process of managing the urban environment, its modification and policing? While the dynamic for the exercise of authority may apparently conform with Michel Foucault’s formulation of disciplinary power as being exercised vertically – that is, by a central authority upon a body of citizens – it is important also to consider its horizontal expression – as a collective process in which communities were implicated.16On ‘panopticism’ and surveillance, see Foucault, 1977, pp. 195–228; Foucault, 2007, pp. 1–28. This chapter goes on to explore both aspects, first by considering street improvements as an expression of the top-down exercise of power, and then by turning to look at evidence of social practices that reveal the horizontal exercise of surveillance as it operated in, and was enabled by, public space.
Urban space as dynamic structure
Walls and gates were – except in Venice – the defining elements of the urban perimeter throughout the Renaissance period; they circumscribed the area inhabited by citizen populations, regulated access to it and symbolised the strength of the city to stand against external threats.17From a sizeable bibliography on fortification, see Adams and Pepper, 1986; Pepper, 2000. With the rise in the use of firearms during the sixteenth century came widespread attention to geometrical, bastioned fortifications, a development described by Martha Pollak as the emergence of ‘military urbanism’.18Pollak, 2010. This later phase of urban defence is characterised not only by the massive scale and geometric forms employed, but also the extensive use of printed city views as a means of disseminating the large-scale interventions that reordered urban perimeters, and represented a form of propaganda intended as a deterrent to siege warfare.19This is a key argument of Pollak, 2010. Such prints updated the tradition of urban iconography of the late medieval and Renaissance periods, which frequently represented the city as bounded by its walls, pierced by gates.20Gardner, 1987; Tracy, 2000. Pollak has described the ‘tight imbrication of street, entry and fortified perimeter’ as defining a new urbanism, structured around ‘the straight street, the regular square, and monumental gate’.21Pollak, 2010, pp. 178ff. While the confluence of these three factors and their symmetrically ordered designs may have come to characterise the later sixteenth- and seventeenth-century city, it is nonetheless evident that these same elements of urban infrastructure (walls, gates, streets) also served to structure and discipline the city in earlier centuries.22For ‘new military urbanism’, which connects historical precedents in such a way as to describe a ‘digital medieval’, see Graham, 2010, pp. 142–5.
While walls had a symbolic and practical function of enclosure and protection, the gate is perhaps the most obvious architectural feature of the pre-modern Italian city to function as a clearly recognisable technology for surveillance and control. In early modern Italy, the gate was a variously porous diaphragm that controlled access to the city, physically and fiscally, regulating the penetrability of urban space by outsiders and setting the diurnal and nocturnal pulse of entries.23On identity and mobility, see Groebner, 2007, pp. 171–221. The image of Securitas that hovers over the city gate of Ambrogio Lorenzetti’s idealised peace-time depiction of Siena and its countryside (see fig. 1), menacingly bears the hangman’s gallows, indicating (as do the scales of justice on the adjacent wall) that urban safety is assured by punishment and control (fig. 54).24From a vast bibliography on these frescoes, see Starn, 1994, p. 70 (and for the juxtaposed Timor, see p. 42). As various studies have shown, the practical functions of medieval and Renaissance gates were loaded with metaphorical language and meanings, which also made them into the city’s ‘frontispieces’, projecting images of collective urban identity outwards to incoming visitors.25For example, Gardner, 1987; Israels, 2008; Robin, 1985. Thus, gates might reveal the protective agency of a religious patron, or, by the sixteenth century, might adopt the massive forms of classical architecture, endowed with their own metaphorical language of protective strength or seignorial rule, or they might do both.26For a sample, see Davies and Hemsoll, 2004, pp. 241–70.
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Description: The City at Peace, detail by Lorenzetti, Ambrogio
54. The figure of Securitas, detail from Ambrogio Lorenzetti, The City at Peace (or Good Government in the City), 1338–40, Sala della Pace, Palazzo Pubblico, Siena (see fig. 1).
Urban gates were almost always aligned with the principal thoroughfares that connected cities to neighbouring towns and beyond, and within the walls these roads became the main connective streets that ordered a city’s layout and circulation.27Kostof, 1992. Logically enough, those streets leading directly from the gate to the city centre tended to acquire greater significance than those that simply served a neighbourhood, though, as Pollak has noted, streets that connected to the city’s entry points ‘carried the effect of military order inside the city’.28For the origins of the ‘military street’, see Pollak, 2010, pp. 180–81. The strategic significance of streets as a military technology, expressive of centralised authority, was not unique to the rulers and designers of the late sixteenth century, however, and can be traced in numerous instances from the fifteenth.
An interesting illustration of this connection is reported in relation to the visit to Rome of King Ferrante of Naples on 6 January 1475 to take part in the jubilee year that had been called by Pope Sixtus IV della Rovere. Stefano Infessura, a law professor at the Rome studio (university), reported on the visit in his diaries, commenting on the king’s large entourage of noblemen, and the rich gifts of cloth (palii) that he brought to the main basilicas and gave to the city’s leading citizens, before touring the city’s antiquities, including the Pantheon.29Infessura, 1890, p. 79. At the end of the visit, Ferrante was received in the papal residence, where he is reported to have advised the pope that if he wished to control the city of Rome he should clear its streets of porticoes and the overhanging structures that cantilevered out from the buildings fronting onto them, which rendered the streets too narrow to defend.30Re, 1920, p. 32, citing Infessura, 1890, pp. 79–80. Ferrante suggested that, if the pope needed to move troops through the city, the streets needed to be wider and less encumbered with projecting structures, while he also commented on the need to be able to block streets to impede free movement about the city. Infessura suggested that subsequent demolitions and improvements, which followed on Ferrante’s advice, were carried out with the stated objective of improving civic image (allustrare la terra) by paving the streets, though the ultimate aim was to strengthen papal control (signoreggiare) of the public realm. Infessura was not the most unbiased of commentators, as Sixtus’ building campaigns repeatedly resulted in papal raids on the university budget, which paid professors’ salaries.31For instances in 1472 and 1474, in which a total of nearly 5,000 florins were siphoned off from the university budget to pay for building projects, see Blondin, 2005, p. 9; see also Spezzaferro, 1973, p. 39. Nonetheless, the direct link between street improvements and papal authority is further evidenced by expressions of ‘papal indignation’ and sizeable fines imposed on anyone who resisted demolitions.32Ait, 1991, p. 885.
As is well known, Sixtus was especially active in improving the city’s street network, with a particular focus on facilitating the movement of citizens and pilgrims through the city and across the Tiber to and from the Vatican precinct.33Spezzaferro, 1973; Tafuri, 1984b. Plans included the construction of a magnificent new bridge – the Ponte Sisto (see fig. 29) – to ease congestion in preparation for the jubilee, but also significant remodelling of the area around the Ponte Sant’Angelo, the principal access point to the Vatican from the city’s tightly packed residential and commercial quarter in the banchi district.34For Ponte Sisto, see Blondin, 2005, pp. 14–20; Schraven, 2011. For Ponte Sant’Angelo, see Ait, 1991, pp. 883, 885; for work on the bridge following the 1450 stampede that led to the death of hundreds of pilgrims, see Burroughs, 1982; Davies, 2016. The diarist Jacopo Gherardi of Volterra reports that in March 1482 Sixtus was returning from one of his regular visits to the church of Santa Maria del Popolo and stopped to observe ongoing work around the bridge, where numerous porticoes and shop fronts were being demolished; confronted by a reluctant owner, Antonio di Marcello Cenci, the pope commanded that Cenci’s shops as well as his house should be razed as a punitive measure, and the shopkeeper be thrown into jail.35Ait, 1991, p. 885, citing Gherardi da Volterra, 1904, p. 92. This severe and public punishment underlines the single-mindedness with which the pope pursued the reorganisation of the approach to the bridge around the piazza di Ponte, and perhaps intimates that there was at least some strategic purpose to the plans beyond the stated ambitions of urbis ornatum.36See also Modigliani, 1998, pp. 207–8. The area was associated with the performance of papal justice, as discussed in the last section of this chapter; see also Ingersoll, 1994; Rebecchini, 2013, pp. 165–9. The old bridge over the Tiber to Castel Sant’Angelo was the site of a much publicised stampede, which cost the lives of hundreds of pilgrims during the jubilee of 1450, after which a succession of popes, from Nicholas V onwards, invested in improvements to the area.37For the stampede and discussion of improvements, see Burroughs, 1982, pp. 97–8. These changes, which included the erection of chapels and monumental sculptures framing the bridge on the south side of the Tiber, certainly improved the appearance of the approach; at the same time, the significant widening of the streets and open space adjacent to the bridge on that side made the site much easier to control from the axially aligned, fortified papal complex of the converted Mausoleum of Hadrian on the north (Vatican) side of the river (fig. 55).38Ingersoll, 1994, p. 179, discusses subsequent phases of fortification of Castel Sant’Angelo under Nicholas V and Alexander VI, which preceded its definitive organisation with elaborate bastions. This stance, equating ordered streets with political control, became explicit with the development of the Canale di Ponte trivium during the sixteenth century (see fig. 27). From the piazza di Ponte, a major venue for public executions (see below, fig. 63), the new trivium funnelled movement from the abitato (the main inhabited area of Rome) towards the Vatican, and conversely served to project the authority of the massive papal fortress of the Castel Sant’Angelo onto the whole city.39On the significance of the site, see Burroughs, 1982. For a Foucauldian interpretation of the tridente, see Ingersoll, 1994; Pollak, 2010, pp. 182–4; Rebecchini, 2013, pp. 165–9.
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Description: The Apparition of the Archangel Michael to Pope Gregory the Great, detail by Siculo,...
55. Piazza di Ponte and the approach to Ponte Sant’Angelo, Rome, detail from Jacopo Siculo (attrib.), The Apparition of the Archangel Michael to Pope Gregory the Great, 1533–4, fresco, church of the Trinità dei Monti, Rome.
The policy of demolishing porticoes, which Sixtus significantly extended, eventually led to the removal of the majority of overhanging structures in Rome; the rare instance of the construction of the sixteenth-century Palazzo Massimo alle Colonne to include a portico is a reminder that these structures had not only previously been widespread, but were also closely associated with the image and architectural self-representation of Rome’s patrician families on the urban stage.40Cafà, 2010, pp. 440–42. As such, while Sixtus’ policy may have had public order at heart, it also set out to establish and amplify papal control over the city of Rome, wresting power and authority from the romani cives, for whom porticoes were identifying spatial markers. Such policies were not unique to Sixtus, nor indeed were they part of a continuous assertion of papal power over that of the local Roman elites; rather, as various studies of papal urbanism show, they participated in a complex process of give and take, in which power relations were repeatedly asserted, contested and negotiated. Significantly, in a city such as Rome, where power relations between the Church and Vatican hierarchies and the local nobility were not always easy, this resulted in particular attention being directed at sites of political or geographical significance, such as the Ponte Sant’Angelo ‘hinge’, which connected the Vatican to the city, and the Capitoline hill, the traditional site of the city’s secular republican government, where urban interventions were clearly intended to be understood as visibly etching political changes on the fabric of the city.41For the political negotiations around the Capitoline, articulated through the display of sculpture, see Burroughs, 1990.
Even in urban centres where there was a less complex relationship between rival governing elites, urban interventions tended to pit the collective interests of the city’s ruling authority against the particular interests of individuals and families. Here, the highlighting of the significance of particular urban sites could be achieved through government-sponsored interventions in public space, which altered its forms and meaning. A clear example of this process is the policy of street improvement – often achieved through the demolition of overhanging structures from the street elevation of domestic properties (ballatoi) – enacted in a number of Italian cities, with increasing rigour from the mid-fifteenth century. Statutes from numerous central Italian cities had demanded the removal of such structures from at least the fourteenth century; yet, as so often with legislative measures, statutes more often tell us about the problems of urban living than they document the actual process of resolving these.42Statutes to enforce the demolition of overhangs in Siena, Pisa and Florence are discussed in Balestracci and Piccinni 1977, pp. 92–3; see also Friedman, 1992. Although legislated for from the fourteenth century, the demolition of overhanging structures, for the most part, seems to have begun noticeably to take effect within the urban fabric of central Italian cities only during the fifteenth century, as a result of quite persuasive policy enforcement and the use of economic incentives. Thus, for example, Siena’s fifteenth-century urban renewal along the sinuous central artery of the strada Romana was promoted through an insistent policy of ballatoio demolitions, overseen by a group of officials called the ufficiali sopra all’ornato; their numerous interventions contributed to fashioning a street that showcased civic image, promoted through the public enforcement of invasive urban-renewal policies.43Nevola, 2007, pp. 91–113. Over the course of twenty years (c. 1460–80), a concerted effort was made to improve the street with new palace and house façades, for which minor public subsidies were offered as an incentive to support what were frequently quite considerable building costs, as is shown in a map documenting ornato interventions (see fig. 19).44Ibid., and table 4, p. 209; the full dataset covers the period 1431–80, but almost all the records relate to 1460–80. Enforced by a government office over a relatively prolonged period, the Sienese focus on the city’s main street created a ceremonial axis leading towards the civic centre on the piazza del Campo; the street projected a shared urban identity, through the strategic placement of civic sculptural symbols and coats of arms, framed at either end by city gates facing north towards Florence and south towards Rome. Just as in Rome, there were citizens who pushed back against the forceful requests for changes to their façades, while others took advantage of the opportunities made available to patrons willing to step in to renovate tracts of central urban real estate.45For a case-by-case analysis of ornato interventions, see Pertici, 1995; see also Nevola, 2007, 91–113. It is tempting to see the resistance to the urban-renewal process in Siena as resembling the critiques of modern-day gentrification, which tends to favour the residential preferences of socio-economic elites in contexts of urban renewal over the concerns of long-term residents, who face more serious consequences from high building costs and rising rents.46Lees, Slater and Wyly, 2013; Tonkiss, 2013; explored further in Chapter 4. See also Hills, 2010.
The work of Siena’s ornato officials, which began in earnest from 1463, may well have taken its inspiration from similar policies enacted by the Sienese Pope Pius II Piccolomini in Viterbo.47For Pius’ interference and advice to the Sienese government, see Nevola, 2007, pp. 59ff. Pius had actively promoted the renewal of the main street of Viterbo in the previous year, as part of the preparations for the Corpus Christi celebrations in June, and financial incentives ensured the speedy execution of demolitions to straighten and widen the street that was to be used for a religious procession led by the pope.48For Viterbo, see Nevola, 2008, with earlier bibliography; Pacciani, 1985, pp. 79–80; Valtieri, 1980, pp. 27–8. Documents from the papal accounts reveal that significant charitable (limosina) payments, ranging between 2 and 10 gold ducats, were awarded to barbers, shoemakers, locksmiths and other residents along the ceremonial route; overhanging structures were evidently torn down in some haste to make way for the ephemeral displays prepared by as many as fifteen cardinals, who paid for them from their own budgets.49Müntz, 1878–82, vol. 1, p. 300; Valtieri, 1980, pp. 27–8. Relevant documents record a series of twenty-four payments, 15–21 June 1462, ASR, Camerale 1: Tesoreria Segreta (Entrata, uscita), 1288, fols 104–6; the first entry, on fol. 104r, makes clear that these were charitable gifts commanded by the pope in reparation for damage done to people’s property. Pius was clear about the value of the work undertaken, stating that: ‘the main street that goes from the castle [Rocca] through the city to the cathedral church, which was once cluttered with walls, overhangs and wooden porticoes, was freed of all superstructures and returned to its ancient splendour.’50Piccolomini, 1984, pp. 1594–5 (Book VIII, ch. 8). It was along this refashioned urban artery that Pius expressed the principle of sovereign papal authority, presenting himself (as he recorded in his autobiography) as the ‘powerful Lord of the world’.51Ibid., pp. 1600–02. For an interpretation of Pius’ Corpus Christi procession as an expression of papal sovereignty, see Prodi, 1982, pp. 922ff.; Tafuri, 1984b, p. 56. Discussed further in Chapter 1. While, of course, the elaborate procession provided the ceremonial context for this ambitious pronouncement, it is nonetheless significant that Pius associated his claim with an urban space that had been shaped at his command, linking the event and its renewed urban setting in his personal account of the Viterbo visit.
A similar instance of radical urban renewal imposed by planning legislation that sought to create privileged processional pathways through the city is documented in the lead-up to Pope Leo X de’ Medici’s famous entry into Florence in 1515; in this case, the demolition of overhangs belonging to working-class wool workers in the via Maggio dealt a final blow to the commercial activity of that street, which subsequently emerged as a prime site for elite housing.52On Leo’s entry, see Ciseri, 1990, which discusses the via Maggio route, and cites Masi, 1906, for the removal of roof and jetty overhangs; see also Nevola, 2011b, pp. 163–4. The via Maggio improvements definitively gentrified a labouring district; the removal of overhangs accentuated sightlines that cut through a swathe of urban fabric, as was implicitly acknowledged by the subsequent careful placement of columns at either end of the street, on piazza San Felice and on piazza Santa Trinita (fig. 56).53Nevola, 2011b, pp. 163–4; see also Saalman, 1990, p. 79. For the initial symbolic accenting of this route, see Shearman, 1975. For the ‘propagandistic’ value of the axis from piazza San Felice to Santa Trinità, and the placement of columns there dedicated to peace and justice, see Spini, 1976. The creation of such processional routes for ceremonial entries was often the occasion for significant and rapidly executed urban renewal campaigns;54Discussed further in Chapter 4. where previously these had tended to focus exclusively on the immediate environs of religious and secular monuments and adjacent public spaces, increasingly from the mid-fifteenth century they were directed at the improvement and beautification of entire streets, so extending the visual influence of ruling authorities over the city’s streetscape.
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Description: Via Maggio by Lieberman, Ralph
56. Via Maggio, Florence, from the south side of Ponte Santa Trinità. Photograph by Ralph Lieberman, 1988.
Demolition, clearance and improvements to streets and infrastructure thus came to be associated with a ruler’s authority. As Evelyn Welch noted for Milan under the Sforzas, Galeazzo Maria and his brother Ludovico received flattering praise from the city’s encomiastic court humanists for their extensive plans to pave Milan’s streets.55Welch, 1995, p. 38, citing Santoro, 1969; for humanist praise of street improvement and bridge-building commissioned by Sixtus IV, see Blondin, 2005. While such interventions might redound to the honour of the dukes, practically speaking, street improvements could be achieved at a relatively low cost to ducal finances, as the established practice in Milan was that costs would be shared among frontagers.56For frontager rules on street maintenance in Siena, see Nevola, 2007, p. 17; on ancient Roman precedents, see Robinson, 1992. Indeed, Galeazzo Maria was quite precise in his allocation of costs for the replacement of brick with stone paving in 1470, insisting that in rented properties the contribution should be divided, a third share falling to the owner and two-thirds to the tenant.57Santoro, 1969, p. 257. Francesco Sforza’s legislation of 1459 had introduced brick paving, which had become rapidly worn; for regulations to replace this with stone, see Martinis, 2008, p. 41 n. 30; see also Patetta, 1997. Such obligations appear to have been universally applied, so that in 1471 Federico da Montefeltro stated in correspondence with his ambassador, Camillo de’ Barzi, that he was willing to pay for the paving of the street adjacent to his Milanese residence in borgo San Maurilio, a building that he had, in fact, received as a gift from his sometime employer, the Duke of Milan.58Martinis, 2008, pp. 40–41, 104, and Appendix 7.
Instances such as these reveal how the Sforza dukes capitalised on mutualised urban improvements to promote a narrative that highlighted such interventions as expressions of seigneurial authority and just rule.59For other examples where civic or parish projects might be represented as ducal through conspicuous display of Sforza arms, see Welch, 1995, ch. 2; for the plague church of San Cristoforo sul Naviglio, see ibid., pp. 32–3. As Welch has documented, this was, of course, a similar strategy to the one adopted for the construction of the massive new residential fortress on the north-western edge of Milan, at Porta Giovia (Castello Sforzesco, fig. 57); here, construction was largely funded by levies on the ducal subject towns, as well as the city of Milan as a whole.60Ibid., pp. 175, 178; for the general practice adopted for the fortification of subject towns, paid from taxes, see ibid., pp. 173–5. However, in 1492, an attempt by Ludovico ‘il Moro’ to open up a piazza and improve the street façades leading to the Castello by removing loggias and overhangs – the same elements targeted a few years earlier in Rome by Sixtus IV – was less successful; the plans were, at least in part, thwarted because no compensation was provided to owners.61Ibid., p. 38; Martinis, 2008, p. 15; Soldi Rondinini, 1983. A rule was introduced on 4 April 1492 to clear all overhangs and structures (including window shutters) that invaded public space, and this was renewed after Milan fell to the French; Santoro, 1969, pp. 257–8. Such interventions to improve the city street network in the environs of the Castello may have been motivated by aesthetic principles of ornato, but it is also evident that the desire to create clear vistas and access between the city and the urban front of the Sforzas’ fortified residential enclave represented a threat to the city and its citizens. This was acknowledged by a late-fifteenth-century local historian, Bernardino Corio, who looked back on Francesco Sforza’s plans to rebuild the Porta Giovia fortress from 1450 and commented that:
the most prudent prince did not wish to carry out this [the reconstruction] out of his own wishes, so that his subjects might not believe that the restoration of these powerful walls implied that he trusted them little [. . .] his desire to reconstruct the fortress [arose] not because he doubted their [the nobles’ and citizens’] faith at any point, but only as an ornament to the city and for security against any enemy who might attack at any time.62Welch, 1995, p. 176.
Corio’s text, full of double negatives, reveals the degree to which architectural interventions of this sort carried powerful meanings that gave unequivocal visual expression to the articulation of power, authority and rulership.63Rubinstein, 1993.
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Description: Castello Sforzesco by Filarete
57. Castello Sforzesco, Milan.
Demolitions and street improvements, then, could do much to raise the status of a ruler; they made sense of larger monumental projects, which they supported by making them more visible, while the implementation of such all-encompassing urbanistic interventions expressed the capillary reach of the ruler’s authority over the city as a whole. Rome’s Canale di Ponte reorganisation was by no means unique in having a more overt intention of articulating the reach of a ruler’s power and, indeed, assuring his protection through design tactics that made public space more open, visible and subject to scopic control. So, for example, the ruler of Rimini, Sigismondo Pandolfo Malatesta, had also engaged in a campaign of demolitions of porticoes, balconies and overhangs, focused particularly on opening up the city’s narrowest streets.64Iannucci, 2001, pp. 83–4 and n. 22; Arduini et al., 1970, pp. 62–3. In the name of ‘splendour, ornament and clarity’, new city statutes issued in 1457 decreed that no new overhangs or other elements that invaded the street should be permitted, and required that smooth façades (simplex et pulcer) be built in their place.65Pasini, 2001, pp. 62–3. These regulations may be understood as part of ambitious plans that led to the large-scale clearance undertaken to create an open area around the fortified courtly residence of the Castel Sismondo, on the side facing towards the city and its principal institutions, gathered around the communal piazza (fig. 58).66Ibid.; see also Petrini, 1980. These plans resulted in the demolition of various earlier Malatesta buildings, but also the city’s ancient baptistery, a convent and part of the bishop’s residence near the ancient cathedral of Santa Colomba, whose bell-tower was also reduced in height for defensive purposes.67Gobbi and Sica, 1982, p. 57; see also Pasini, 2001, with references to contemporary chronicles of Rimini by Tobia Borghi and Baldo Branchi. The resulting open space, which forms the foreground for Piero della Francesca’s portrait roundel depicting the castle in the St Sigismund fresco in the Tempio Malatestiano, and was also depicted on commemorative medals, gave the Malatesta residence a commanding position in relation to the city, powerfully expressing Sigismondo’s control in visual and political terms (fig. 59).68For a discussion of Sigismondo’s use of the castle in iconography of rule, see Woods-Marsden, 1989, pp. 131–3, 135; D’Elia, 2016, pp. 33–8. The castle’s new prominence gave it a role comparable to that of many other seigneurial fortified residences in late medieval and Renaissance Italy – making it equally a secure seat in the face of external threats and an expression of dominion over the local population.69Rubinstein, 1993.
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Description: Castel Sismondo by Brunelleschi, Filippo
58. Castel Sismondo, Rimini.
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Description: Sigismondo Pandolfo Malatesta before St Sigismund by Piero della Francesca
59. Piero della Francesca, Sigismondo Pandofo Malatesta before St Sigismund, 1451, fresco, church of San Francesco (or Tempio Malatestiano), Rimini.
These few examples – and there are, of course, many others – help us to see that urban improvements might have multiple agendas, and that there were always winners and losers in the process. In Siena, government-sponsored collaborative processes of collective patronage unquestionably benefited some more than others: butchers and several other trades were zoned out of the centre, and a number of less wealthy citizens were forced to abandon their centrally placed homes because they could not afford the high costs of rebuilding. The political significance of street renewal campaigns was more evident where a seigneurial power was involved, as the underlying rhetoric of encomiastic texts and visual symbols combined to communicate a clear message, although this also applied in republican centres. A key theme in all these interventions is the exercise of centralised control on the public space of streets, and the heightened visibility afforded to particular buildings where secular power resided.
In urban renewal and beautification can thus be seen the controlling hand of authority, expressed at its most essential level by the enhanced visibility such interventions afforded. Civic governments as well as despotic or enlightened rulers promoted such urban renewal policies and processes in Renaissance Italy, and the political implications of the decisions that underlie them should not be underestimated.70The key work is Tafuri, 1973; see also Tafuri, 1992. These interventions facilitated movement around the city, but the preferential channels that they created tend to reveal the underlying distribution of power within a city at a given period. New streets or street layouts can thus be read as the physical sedimentation of power relations, and the underlying meaning of these adaptations to the fabric were most explicitly manifest on ceremonial occasions, when the power relations that shaped them were physically articulated through ritual movement.71For some examples of the activating power of ritual on the built form of streets, see Çelik, Favro and Ingersoll, 1994a. At such times, political agents became actors in the dynamic structures they had fashioned: in 1462 Pius II used the Corpus Christi processional litany in Viterbo to reject conciliarist Church governance in favour of papal supremacy, while in 1515 Leo X entered Florence triumphantly as Pontifex Maximus.72Discussed above; see also Ciseri, 1990, pp. 44–54. At other times, too, city streets served a key function in the articulation of power structures in the city – often made apparent through symbols, signage and other permanent markers – while also providing the vital infrastructure for the effective exercise of that power.
Eyes on the street: A pervasive network?
The term ‘surveillance’ emerged in the early nineteenth century and perhaps the concept’s best-known analysis has been the work of Michel Foucault, whose study of the power relations exemplified by the gaze in Enlightenment Europe explored the architectural and mental panopticon as a form of – and metaphor for – social control.73The underpinning philosophical key for hegemonic theories of surveillance is Foucault, 1977, which in turn relies on Bentham, 1995. Recent concerns with closed-circuit camera surveillance (CCTV) and the so-called ‘surveillance society’, as well as heightened attention to issues of the ownership – or lack of it – of urban public space have focused the debate on the city and the place of individuals in relation to surveillance by government and institutions.74For example, Minton, 2009; Graham, 2010. Contemporary discourse on surveillance relies on Foucauldian themes of power and the role of technologies in the exercise of discipline and control, notwithstanding that these have been further complicated by the fragmented and overlapping authority of private and public systems and governance, which some observers have described as creating a ‘honeycomb of jurisdictions’, resembling pre-modern or medieval conditions.75For the ‘digital medieval’, see Graham, 2010, p. 145, citing Holston and Appadurai, 1999, p. 13. Surveillance technologies are seen to offer the impression of one overarching authority, while at the same time the everyday practice of their deployment and management is often rather more piecemeal, distributed among various security agencies, police forces and private providers.76On CCTV, see, for example, Lyon, 2001. CCTV cameras, especially, have been invested with the collective belief that they can provide absolute protection, but it is not clear that, in fact, they can entirely replace what the influential urbanist Jane Jacobs described as the ‘eyes on the street’, previously afforded by the social networks of neighbourhood self-policing.77Jacobs, 1961, pp. 29ff.
While there are analogies between our modern understanding of surveillance and the strategies at work in the urban public space of streets in early modern Italy, some caution is, of course, needed in translating the term and the practice to a period before that of its theoretical formulation. Famously, Foucault’s Surveiller et punir opens with a lengthy account of the public torture and death of Robert-François Damiens in Paris in 1757, a striking illustration of the spectacle of public punishment, which, Foucault argued, was to be replaced by the ‘disciplinary society’, reliant on varied forms of panoptic surveillance; pre-modern forms of exemplary punishment would be replaced by capillary networks of the ‘faceless gaze that transformed the whole social body into a field of perception’.78Foucault, 1977, pp. 3–7, 195–228 (quotation, p. 214). While this polarised contrast is compelling, its rhetorical power does not necessarily match the historical evidence. As we saw in the last section, urban interventions in earlier periods may be understood to have facilitated the centralised exercise of power and its performative display (through processions and displays of punishment), while at the same time functioning as panoptic technologies that exercised a permanent control over urban populations. Furthermore, as we shall see, the complicit participation of citizen populations in the policing of public space anticipates elements of the disciplinary society that Foucault identified as a later phenomenon. What is proposed here, therefore, is a reading of early modern urban public space that adopts categories and distinctions from Foucault’s discussion of surveillance and disciplinary control, but adapts these by considering the concurrent deployment of the vertical exercise of power (by few upon many), with the more distributed or participatory horizontal model (many to many).79Ibid.; Foucault, 2007, pp. 1–28.
In seeking to understand how urban public spaces were managed by city authorities, the attention in this section shifts from a primary focus on the physical ordering of the public realm to a consideration of the practices that were adopted to control and police these spaces. While, of course, it would be quite incorrect to suggest that urban space was subject to control only when crimes took place, it is fair to say that we know a good deal more about how people and their actions were managed when there were breaches of the law, resulting in prosecutions that have left a significant trace in the archives.80On the use of crime for social history, and particularly for the sort of micro-histories of how space was used, see Muir and Ruggiero, 1994; Cohen, 2004. Such rich seams of evidence provide a primary source for social history, but have tended to be overlooked by historians of the built environment; here, selected examples will be employed to examine how citizens were implicated in the day-to-day surveillance of the neighbourhoods where they lived and worked, in order to understand how these spaces were regulated by day and at night.
In Siena during the fifteenth century, there was a practice of offering occasional amnesties – usually on the Marian feast days of the Annunciation and the Assumption (and sometimes Christmas) – that led to the release from the city’s jails of prisoners held for relatively minor crimes. A series of accounts from the second half of the fifteenth century summarise the nature of the crimes that had been committed, offering an interesting cross-section of cases: the petty criminals had been detained predominantly for assault and knife crime, theft, gambling and blasphemy.81ASS, Concistoro, 2163 (Suppliche di carcerati), 1463–80. Although these were offences of varying gravity, they had, for the most part, taken place in the city’s streets and squares, where they were sometimes heard or seen. However, what stands out from among the numerous cases is how many took place at night (nocte tempo) when they might more easily go undetected; indeed, so greatly was night-time preferred for criminal activity that by law the penalty for a crime committed ‘after the bell that marks the evening has sounded’ was doubled.82ASS, Concistoro, 2163, fols 182–3, 1473. In Arezzo, night-time gambling carried penalties ten times those levied in the day: ASA, Antico Comune – Statuti e capitolazioni: 16, 1503, 3.xl, fol. 111. Night, of course, offered the cover of darkness, making it easier for criminals to move about the city, and as a result curfews and night patrols were widely used to mitigate the risk of night crime of all sorts throughout Italy.83For night-time and violence, see Ekirch, 2005, pp. 61–90; Koslofsky, 2011.
An amusing tale of a couple of bungling burglars gives some impression of the ease of movement that could be provided by the cover of night in the city. In November 1467 in Siena, Giovanni di Benedetto was sent to prison and fined 150 lire for having attempted to steal silver jewellery to the value of 200 florins, including rings and belts, from the shop of one Biagio di Pietro.84This paragraph is based on the account in ASS, Concistoro, 2163, fol. 152, Annunciation 1468. The attempted crime was carried out with an accomplice, Giovanni Battista from Parma, with the aid of a jemmy for breaking locks, which neither was apparently particularly expert at using. One night they went to Biagio’s shop, where, despite repeated attempts, they failed to break in; the following night they tried a different strategy by attempting to break into the neighbouring barber’s shop, belonging to one Ristoro, where they planned to steal money and then break through to Biagio’s shop by knocking through the wall that separated the two premises. Having again failed, they planned to return to try again the night after, and while the account does not record how they were caught, their comings and goings around the shops cannot have gone unnoticed. Although it appears in a volume of criminal records, the story is more suited to a collection of novellas; the hopeless thief Giovanni ended up behind bars from 5 December until the Annunciation amnesty of March the following year.
We have to read a little beyond the somewhat summary account of the pardoned crime to get a sense of the events, where they played out and what they tell us about urban space and how it was policed. The small-time crooks, Giovanni and Giovanni Battista, moved around the city’s streets at night, targeting a shop selling luxury cloth and other goods (a ligrittiere), hoping to break in by using a piece of specialist equipment that they were not very good at handling. The shop was almost certainly on a central street close to Siena’s main square, an area closely packed with luxury shops of this sort, as well as amenities such as the neighbouring barber.85For the shops in this central part of Siena, see Nevola, 2007, pp. 124–8; for the barber on the Campo, see p. 92. While the details of how their plan unravelled are not documented, it seems likely that one of the night patrols of the city’s podestà legal office caught them and brought one of them, at least, to justice; night patrols carried lamps and were thus able to see wrongdoers, removing the cloak of darkness that protected these two thieves from their fumbling lock-breaking on the street.86For the use of light in policing, see Koslofsky, 2011, p. 133. On the policing work of the podestà, see Dean, 2007, pp. 11–13; Ikins Stern, 1994, pp. 74–86; Zorzi, 1994. Night-time was, indeed, central to the events that unfolded: bells established the boundary between night and day, raising the stakes for criminals, while also providing protection from the everyday surveillance that operated during daylight hours.
All manner of theft is reported as having taken place during the hours of night, for which offenders were imprisoned but were eligible for release on the Marian amnesties. So in January 1467 Giovanni di Simone from Perugia was jailed in Siena for multiple thefts from a food shop, as well as from the hospital of Santa Maria della Scala, and was then released in August on the feast of the Assumption.87ASS, Concistoro, 2163, fol. 132. The same amnesty saw the release of Giovanni di Bartolomeo from Florence, who had absconded with a rather more valuable haul of 22 papal carlini and a gold ring worth a further ten carlini from one Magdalena at the Albergo dell’Ocha.88Ibid., fol. 135. Thefts from taverns and inns were quite common, and hostelries were evidently a favourite haunt for small-time thieves like Cristoforo di Nanni, again a Florentine, convicted twice for multiple thefts in shops, taverns and the city brothel in 1468; jail sentences of three to six months would seem to be quite a high price to pay for minor returns in the form of sheets, eiderdowns and other items of domestic linen.89Ibid., fols 153, 179, (relating to amnesties in 1478 and 1482). Domenica, the wife of Luca di Antonio di Becco, was jailed for a couple of months for her night-time incursions into a vegetable garden belonging to Francesco di Giovanni, where she took onions and other vegetables to the value of a florin, which she shamelessly took to market on the piazza del Campo the following day!90Ibid., fol. 213. A similar theft from a vegetable garden was pardoned at Christmas 1463; ibid., fol. 83v.
What examples such as these and countless others indicate is the degree to which attempts were made to police the streets and other spaces at night; while shops were at risk, it was the more permeable spaces of inns and taverns that were most prone to thefts, as access to them was necessarily easier (as, indeed, was also the case for urban vegetable gardens). Moreover, taverns were – as emerges so clearly from the exemplary case of Antonio Rinaldeschi, discussed at the outset of this chapter – attractors of a range of other restricted and illegal activities, particularly prostitution, gambling and blasphemy. So, for example, a beneficiary of the Assumption amnesty in 1463 was the Sienese Antonio di Iacomo, nicknamed ‘Nibbio’, jailed for playing card tricks in a tavern on the via Francigena, south of Siena in the village of Torrenieri, where he cheated a passing traveller called Cristoforo out of his horse and 30 ducats.91Ibid., fol. 179. Nibbio was evidently something of a card-sharp, and in 1472 he was again pardoned for swindling. On this occasion it emerges that he was operating with a small gang (Francesco di Ferrando Spagnuolo, Stefano da Milano and Agostino da Verona are named); having spotted an easy target in a hotel outside Siena’s northern city of Porta Camollia, they took their victim off with them to play cards in a nearby field, where they lured the unnamed Lombard into a sense of security by playing with false coins (monete d’ottone), and then swindled him out of the considerable sum of 4 ducati larghi and 10 carlini.92Ibid. The other members of the gang were also caught, jailed and pardoned; fols 182–3. Heavy gambling losses might result in an explosion of anger, but this too could carry the risk of considerable penalties. On 11 January 1467, Lorenzo da Rosia was heard blaspheming the Virgin Mary after losing 18 ducats at gambling; he was jailed on 18 March and was fortunate to be pardoned just a week later at the Annunciation amnesty.93Ibid., fol. 153v. What is somewhat surprising, in this case (and others) of blasphemy, is that the records report the precise nature of the verbal crime: in this instance, Lorenzo damned the Virgin and called her a whore.94Ibid.
Instances of reported speech of this sort convey some impression of how the evidence for the prosecution of such petty crimes was assembled. In recording the blasphemous language that Lorenzo used, the account suggests the presence of a witness who presumably reported the crime, whereas in cases of swindling or robbery it was almost certainly the victim who went to the law-enforcement authorities. In some instances, one of the city’s legal or policing officials directly witnessed events, as in December 1467, when Filippo di Marco, known as ‘il Perugino’, and his sidekick, Francesco Berti, nicknamed ‘il Genovese’, traded insults and a few punches with the city official Antonio del Piemonte in the tavern of Donna Ysea di Spagna on the centrally located via Diacceto in Siena.95Ibid., fol. 140v. Similarly, a misguided desire for revenge for a gambling fine he had received from the local magistrate of Sinalunga, Lorenzo di Nanni, led Giuliano di Antonio to sharpen a knife and lie in wait for him near the town’s castle, with the intention of killing him; Lorenzo escaped and went on to prosecute his assailant for attempted murder.96Ibid., fol. 152v, 1468. On another occasion, on 24 February 1468, a night-time scuffle during the Carnival season between a hot-headed group of Sienese noblemen and the city police (cavaliere del podestà) on Siena’s central crossroad, adjacent to the Campo, was evidently prosecuted directly by the officials present at the scene.97ASS, Concistoro, 2157, fol. 37, with additional information from fols. 38, 57, 62. The case is discussed in greater detail in Nevola, 2013b, pp. 85–9.
The relatively small number of police and officials who patrolled cities, however, meant that other methods were essential for law enforcement, and a number of mechanisms existed to facilitate the process by which citizens could report crimes. Among these, the denunzia (‘denunciation’) was the most widespread system of social control and self-regulation in early modern Italian cities.98For brief comments on accusations, see Dean, 2007, pp. 17–20; see also Zorzi, 1994, pp. 44–8. Denunciation (and its correlate, defamation) as a process is explored in its Venetian context in de Vivo, 2007, pp. 86–114; see also Horodowich, 2005. Little attention is given to the physical process of depositing denunciations and its spatial implications. For a broader picture of the construction of reputation (fama) in public space, see Fenster and Smail, 2003a, and essays therein, esp. those by Chris Wickham and Thomas Kuehn. In Venice news and information circulated widely in the public space, and denunciations to the authorities – including, by the seventeenth century, the Inquisition – were frequently based on intelligence supplied by spies and informants, who acquired it by associating with gatherings (bozzoli) that took place at street corners and other informal meeting places around the city.99De Vivo, 2007, ch. 3: ‘City’. A similar process operated in the transfer of other forms of informal knowledge – for example, gossip – which was gathered by observation and listening in public places, and communicated to sites of authority, where it might assist decision-making or the application of sanctions.100Ibid., pp. 86–114; Horodowich, 2005; for gossip in Venice, see Cowan, 2011. For balconies and other privileged sites for the spreading of gossip, see Chapter 6. This sequence, whereby information as a commodity was created and shaped in public space, and transferred to an authoritative body, where it would be elaborated and acted upon by government institutions and officials, reveals an important aspect of the public sphere in the pre-modern city, and the role of citizens in the process of what might be described as self-surveillance.101The term is taken from Zygmunt Bauman, who uses it to describe conditions operating in contemporary society, by which individuals opt in through adoption of such technologically enabled tools as smartphones with GPS; Bauman and Lyon, 2013.
Denunzie existed in various degrees of formality, and were a key component of the legal system; they ranged from formal accusations brought by publicly appointed officials to far more informal and apparently anonymous reports submitted by citizens, usually on slips of paper, for scrutiny by government officials.102Terry-Fritsch, 2013. While the former were a frequent prelude to the court proceedings that fill countless volumes of countless archives, documentary evidence for the latter is rather rare, as the slips of paper that were deposited were expendable, and thus tend not to have survived in the archives. Nevertheless, we know that in a number of cities a network of denunciation boxes was distributed at various locations – usually associated with the seats of government offices – where citizens could deposit their testimonies. So, for example, in Florence what Allie Terry-Fritsch has described as a ‘focused inner ring of surveillance’ was articulated through the central placement of denunciation boxes (tamburi) in or outside the cathedral, Orsanmichele, the Palazzo della Signoria, the Palazzo del Podestà (Bargello) and the church of San Pier Scheraggio.103Ibid., p. 166. In Venice there was a network of bocche di leone boxes, sculpted in the form of the head of a lion to evoke the civic patron, St Mark (fig. 60), a number of which were placed around the Palazzo Ducale, with others at churches and various locations in the city’s sestrieri to facilitate local depositions.104Zorzi, 1983, p. 54. In Venice it appears that denunciations had to be signed and witnessed by two people; Horodowich, 2005; for little boxes as more informal precursors of the bocche, see also Rospocher, 2015, p. 194. Similarly, in Bologna in 1509, following the re-establishment of papal control over the city, a box (tamburo) was placed on the piazza Maggiore to encourage citizens to speak out against anyone who supported the exiled Bentivoglio family, though it appears to have attracted only ‘nonsense’.105Rospocher, 2015, p. 194. In Siena the boxes (known as the cassettine delle denunzie) existed in at least two locations in the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, one by the high altar in the cathedral and another at the doorway to the podestà’s residence on the left side of the Palazzo Pubblico.106ASS, Regolatori, 254, 1455–90, and Ufficiali di custodia: Deliberazioni, 29, 1535–6, gather denunciations from the entrance to the Palazzo del Podestà; for further documentary references to boxes in the cathedral and city hall in 1498, see Jackson, 2010, p. 457.
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Description: One of the network of bocche di leone in Venice by Unknown
60. One of the network of bocche di leone in Venice, by the door of Santa Maria della Visitazione. The inscription invites citizens to deposit ‘denunciations regarding public health’.
What these examples show – and similar practices were adopted in other cities, where denunciations boxes were often in or near the city’s principal churches – is that while denunciations were purportedly anonymous, the process and setting adopted for the transaction was, in fact, often very public.107For an initial discussion of the public and participatory nature of disciplinary power, see Nevola, 2013b, pp. 101–5, which closely aligns with the conclusions reached independently in Terry-Fritsch, 2013, pp. 169–72. The locations of the denunciation boxes, attached to the principal sites of secular and divine authority in the city, imposed a very public performance for the depositing of slips, which was perhaps also intended to ensure that the procedure was not abused.108For an assumption of the anonymous nature of the accusation process, see Dean, 2007, p. 18 (which does not cover the physical process of depositing accusations); that the system was abused is documented through vandalism (to boxes in churches in Prato, Arezzo, Pisa and Empoli), as well as cases of false accusations; Terry-Fritsch, 2013, pp. 172–3. The submission of a denunzia in so prominent and populous a location became a visible and public transaction witnessed by the polity. This, in turn, might be regarded as evidence to suggest that denunzie were not lone private acts carried out by individuals, but rather more an expression of citizen participation in the exercise of disciplinary power, implicating the citizen body in the exercise of law and order.
Besides the process of deposition used for such denunciations, the actual information that they reported was frequently collected in the streets, as they often documented infringements of regulations. It is impossible to know how many of the beneficiaries of the Marian amnesties discussed above had found themselves in jail as a result of citizen denunciations. However, a rare set of surviving cases of denunzie from fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Siena provides evidence of the variety of misdemeanours that were reported; the archives contain a number of volumes related to the prosecution of breaches of regulations that pertained above all to sumptuary laws, prostitution and sodomy (also, from the sixteenth century, failure to comply with rules about the treatment of plague victims).109ASS, Ufficiali di sanità, 1; Tre segreti sopra le vesti, 1–3. The overwhelming majority of denunciations in a volume for the period 1470–90 are complaints of fiscal impropriety among those in public office – an expression, it might be suggested, of the polity policing its public officials – though there are occasional instances of other categories of infringement.110ASS, Regolatori, 254, 1455–90; the accusations are skewed to fiscal impropriety, as the regolatori were officials who primarily oversaw city expenditure and accounts. There are reports of illegal gambling dens, a scattering of infringements of sumptuary laws and a few cases of Jewish moneylenders not portando il segno (‘wearing the mark’); in the case of Elia di Salamone from Poggibonsi, whose banco was in front of Fontebranda, this appears to have been an excuse to complain of the high interest rates he charged for a loan.111Ibid., fol. 258, 31 November 1477; for other instances, see fol. 262r–v, 24 October 1482, fol. 290v, 10 February 1488. In one instance of 20 April 1478, an unidentified denouncer opens with ‘You officials are fast asleep!’, and goes on to refer to a series of infringements of sumptuary laws:
Punish the wife of Francesco di Quirico and the daughter of Ristoro di Notto – the one that isn’t married – [. . .] because on the past 28 March each of them wore a bird embroidered with pearls, as all Siena can bear witness many times, as well as Pauolo di Gherardo. Also the wife of Danese Saracini who wore two jewels on various occasions this past Janaury, as Pauolo di Iacomo di Ser Angelo and Ser Tommaso Biringucci and various others can testify. And the wife of Lodovico di Pietro Carli wore three jewels with pendants as Gheri Borghini, [and] Gabriello di Bartolomeo di Pauolo will witness.112Ibid., fol. 253r, 20 April 1478; on sumptuary laws in Siena, see Jackson, 2010.
While it is not clear whether the denouncer was one of the named witnesses, the account is outspoken in stating that these infringements of regulations restricting the wearing of jewels had been observed by various respectable people. More significant still is the claim that ‘all Siena’ – the whole city – could testify to the facts, confirming the very public nature of these women’s flouting of the rules. Denunciations thus created a feedback loop, revolving around public space. Like the small sample of crimes in Siena discussed above – thefts, assaults and other unlawful acts – the infringements reported by the denunzie took place in public space and were witnessed by citizens, who reported their observations through a public mechanism that transferred their adjudication to the authorities.
In fact, as has recently been shown for Florence, citizen denunciations often filtered through government offices and found their way back onto the streets through the actions of the town crier (banditore), whose pronouncements regularly sought to identify the perpetrators of local petty criminal acts.113Milner, 2013. While one of the banditore’s tasks was to announce, regularly and repeatedly, various measures regarding public order – such as rules on observing the night-time curfew, the prohibition on carrying weapons, bans on gambling and so forth – much of his business was evidently made up of appeals that came through from denunciations and other citizen requests.114For examples of regular pronouncements regarding behaviour in public spaces, see Milner, 2013, pp. 145–7, doc. 11, 5 November 1482. Thus, for instance, in October 1514, Florence’s town crier was sent out to the very spot at canto alle Macine where Jacopo Giachetti from Sesto had been sleeping under a butcher’s table and had his purse stolen from under his hat, to seek information on its return.115Milner, 2013, p. 120. In describing fugitive slaves, missing children or wanted individuals (memorably, for example, Niccolò Machiavelli and Benvenuto Cellini), the town criers crowd-sourced their search, calling on the polity to recover individuals who sought refuge in the relative anonymity of the city’s streets and public spaces.116Ibid., pp. 123–4. Announcements of even less importance, concerning the loss or theft of jewellery, livestock, or items of smaller value still, such as linen or clothing, were made with specific reference to the locations from where the goods had been taken.117Ibid., pp. 126–8. As noted above, theft and assault often took place at night, and the town crier’s synthesised accounts frequently reported this; such was the case in the unusual incident of early 1482, when graves in front of Santa Maria Novella were robbed and desecrated overnight and information was sought the following day to identify the perpetrators.118Ibid., p. 144, doc. 8.
Everyday incidents such as those reported in the denunzie, or for which the banditore records provide second-hand accounts, reveal a sort of database of public knowledge, on which the polity relied. Because most of the evidence they present relates to criminal activities of a somewhat minor sort, they offer a glimpse of the everyday interactions between people and the public spaces of city streets and squares, and the ways in which citizens were actively involved in managing these spaces. As such they constitute a valuable counterpoint to the vertically exercised control of public space, articulated through operations such as street straightening and beautification operated by central government authorities; by contrast, they provide a view of public spaces as the key arena within which the citizen body acted in the horizontal exercise of disciplinary power.119These denunzie were by no means unique expressions of the horizontal practice of surveillance at this period; for example, the discussion of the catasto tax returns (Kent and Kent, 1982, pp. 24–74, esp. 48–66 on ‘the atmosphere of the neighborhood’, exploring the effects on taxation of neighbourhood relationships) and participation in local government or lay religious confraternities in 15th-century Florence (Eckstein, 1995) underlines the degree to which enforcement was partly assured by the extent to which everyone knew their neighbours’ affairs. For the practice of horizontal surveillance, as applied to reputation, see also Wickham, 2003, p. 26. In line with the observations of Jane Jacobs, who noted the central role of neighbourhood or community networks in the policing and management of local areas in modern cities, denunzie document a process of regulating behaviour in which local residents were active participants, as opposed to passive subjects or bystanders.
Regulating spatial confinement
In order to explore this process further, it is worth considering perhaps the most spatially determined and contingent activity in the early modern city: prostitution. A number of studies of prostitution in Italian cities have begun to explore the spatial dimensions of its legislative controls and practice.120Ghirardo, 2001; Mazzi, 1991; Storey, 2008, pp. 17–18; Terpstra, 2015b. For a broader discussion of the scholarship in relation to spatial approaches, see Nevola, 2013a, p. 1337. As is widely known, prostitution was closely controlled in pre-modern cities, and copious legislation survives to document how sex workers were confined to specific areas and required to wear distinguishing clothing or marks in order to separate them from ‘honest’ women. Controlling sex was considered so important that many Italian cities appointed groups of officials specifically tasked with seeing that legislation was applied, and prosecuting offenders; in many cities they were known as ufficiali dell’onestá, in recognition of their primary function of protecting morality and decorum.121Canosa and Colonnello, 1989. For Florence, see Brackett, 1993; Mazzi, 1991; Rocke, 1996. Streets, taverns and bath-houses were closely associated with prostitution, and the prosecution of this activity was increasingly street-specific, as well as being associated predominantly with night-time, which, as we have seen, was a time of generally heightened security controls – to the point that in Florence there was a specific office, the ufficiali della notte (‘officers of the night’).122Rexroth, 2007, pp. 189–217, 266–303. As is shown in Rocke, 1996, the ufficiali della notte were overwhelmingly concerned with policing sodomy, though in terms of spatial dynamics their surveillance of urban space was similar to that of other agencies. Moreover, while many prostitutes registered their profession with the authorities, in line with the statutory requirements of most cities, others did not, giving rise to an almost unending stream of denunciations levelled against women.
While such denunciations often turned out to be defamatory accusations brought by unscrupulous neighbours, the accounts of these cases tell us a good deal about how prostitution might be located and identified in the urban environment of cities, large and small. Although cities such as Venice and Rome were infamous for the high numbers of prostitutes who operated in the service of large populations of mobile males, even a small provincial subject town such as Arezzo had a sizeable red-light district, as emerges from the sixteenth-century accounts of the officials in charge of honour (ufficiali dell’onoranza).123ASA, Antico Comune – Ufficiali dell’onoranza: 1, 1564–93. In Arezzo, as in most cities, the city statues required that prostitutes should live and work in the public brothel or in a clearly defined neighbourhood adjacent to it; relatively high fines were levied for every breach of this law, and citizens who allowed prostitutes to operate from their properties could be fined as well.124ASA, Antico Comune – Statuti e capitolazioni: 16, 1503, 3.liv, fol. 114. Similar legislation was repeated in 1580; ASA, Antico Comune – Statuti e capitolazioni: 31; Statutorum Aretii 1580, 1.lxv, fol. 74. The statutes also specified that public opinion (pubblica fama) was enough to establish whether someone was working as a prostitute – a measure that was again widely applied throughout Italy, and gave rise to many accusations that were brought to trial.125Ibid.
In line with prostitutes operating in other cities, the majority of those who registered in Arezzo were not local, but had migrated there to work; leaving home was evidently the first spatial consequence of working as a prostitute.126Ghirardo, 2001, p. 405 (for Ferrara); Mazzi, 1991, p. 293 (for Florence). Perhaps because it was a relatively minor centre, and consequently the potential to make a decent living was less than in larger cities, lists drawn up in 1565 and 1571 indicate that most prostitutes working there came from small towns quite close to Arezzo, whereas prostitutes working in Florence, Rome or Venice travelled far greater distances from their places of origin.127ASA, Antico Comune – Ufficiali dell’onoranza: 1, 1564–93, fol. 20v (22 September 1565), fol. 62r (17 May 1571). While some of the women working in Arezzo had moved from Florence, Rome and Perugia, the majority were from smaller and more local towns such as Borgo (San Sepolcro), Castiglion Fiorentino and the Casentino villages of Talla and Catenaia.128Ibid. Once they arrived in Arezzo, prostitutes were faced by the second spatial consequence of their trade, as they were required to take up residence in the city brothel or one of the houses that packed the narrow street of borgo a Piano, on the north-eastern side of the city, not far from the walls and Porta Crocifera, yet only a short walk from the city’s commercial centre.129Ibid., fol. 77v (8 August 1577), specifies the precise section of borgo a Piano (today via Piana), as delimited by the intersections of neighbouring streets. By the second half of the sixteenth century, they also had to wear a yellow ribbon as an identifying mark, as was reported in November 1570, when Elisabetta and her daughter Cassandra from Montepulciano were accused of hiding theirs with scarves.130Ibid., fol. 56v (14 November 1570), fol. 61r (14 May 1571), fol. 77v (8 August 1577) for reiteration of the law that required a ribbon of at least one braccio in length to be displayed on the head or breast.
Prostitutes were therefore confined to precisely defined locations in the city, with the specifically stated aim that they should not ‘corrupt the honesty and goodness of the other [women]’.131Ibid., stated in various instances, including fol. 61r (14 May 1571). Consequently, many of the denunciations that were reported through the onoranza officials relate to topography, as they described incidents perceived as evidencing the illicit activity of prostitutes operating outside the area to which they were meant to be confined. Such was the case with Flaminia di Giorgio from Rome, accused of working as a prostitute from a street close to the monastery of San Francesco in January 1566; in her testimony to the onoranza, she claimed to have moved out of a tavern facing onto a small piazza, where she had previously lived and presumably worked, as she wished to ‘live well’.132Ibid., fol. 41r (21 January 1566) though fol. 41v documents a renewed accusation (6 May 1567). Similarly, Betta di Francesco del Cortesia from Cicigliano lived in the central via della Bicchieraia, close to the piazza Grande and Pieve di Santa Maria, described as an ‘honourable area’ (luogho honorato); various witnesses described street brawls, men hanging around her door, and outbreaks of shouting and other loud noises at night, which led one neighbour to declare that he ‘considers and believes her to be a public whore’.133Ibid., fol. 2 (25 October 1564). In addition to discussing the noise created around the houses of women accused of working in the sex trade (fare copia del suo corpo), most of the evidence presented was visual, and relates to what neighbours perceived as the comings and goings around the houses of those they accused, both at night and during the day.
So, for instance, a remarkably long-drawn-out case, lasting almost two years, was recorded in November 1564, when Antonia di Bernardino del Lepre, alias ‘la Binacchiona’, and her mother, Madonna Nanna, were accused of working as a prostitute and procuress respectively, on the borgo Maestro, not far from the permitted street.134Ibid., fol. 3 (28 November 1564). The denunciation stated that the respectable way of life on that street, ‘where citizens and honourable people live[,] is not compatible with such dishonest people’, whose conduct ‘sets a bad example’. Among many witnesses who came forward for both sides, one Iacopo di Piero reported that he had seen young men go in and out of the house at all times of day and night, and that there was a constant stream of men knocking loudly on the women’s door, or throwing pebbles at the windows to get their attention.135Ibid. A local dispute between the women and their neighbours was evidently raging, but in January of the following year the case took a new turn when a prosecution witness from one of the city’s leading families, Matteo di Francesco Bacci, came forward, claiming that the two had pubblica fama as prostitutes and ‘that for at least a year to date he has heard people speak and judge them in the city of Arezzo in the shops, the public street corners and where people gather to gossip’.136Ibid. By June they were identified as ‘shameless, dishonest women, leading a bad life’ and required to join the registered prostitutes in borgo a Piano.
Whatever the truth behind the accusation brought against ‘la Binacchiona’ and her mother, Nanna, the episode speaks clearly to the spatial dynamics that operated in such denunciations of pubblica fama. Clear distinctions were drawn between licensed and prohibited areas: the pair were eventually required to move no more than 50 metres to the permitted street, indicating the hard boundaries that were evidently clearly understood by neighbourhood residents. Moreover, the behaviour that some of the witnesses described – knocking on doors, throwing pebbles, men shouting and hanging around doorways – reveals that acoustic marks underlined how the sex trade blurred boundaries between public and domestic space. It is significant that witnesses were providing accounts of what they saw and heard on the street – presumably from the windows of their homes as well as from the street itself – thus documenting the ways in which public space conspired to shape reputations. Finally, as the testimony of Matteo Bacci shows, it was from the public spaces of the city where men socialised – shops, street corners and other places – that the collectively assembled verdict on the women’s activities was delivered.
This evidence from Arezzo conforms with findings by scholars for numerous other Italian cities. Confinement of prostitutes to a public brothel or adjacent carefully delimited streets was a common practice, as was the selection of a location that was relatively easy to access and yet not prominently visible. In Florence the ufficiali dell’onestá established the focus for the sex trade in a relatively large enclave in the city centre, right at the heart of the Mercato Vecchio, an area also densely packed with taverns (fig. 61).137Rosenthal, 2015b, pp. 17–19; Terpstra, 2015b, pp. 75–6. Plans in the early fifteenth century to establish additional purpose-built brothels in the working-class districts of Santa Croce and Santo Spirito were never enacted, and by the mid-sixteenth century a list of eighteen streets that prostitutes could work on was drawn up in recognition of the fact that their activity was no longer confined to the central market area alone.138Terpstra, 2010, pp. 17–20; Terpstra, 2015b, p. 76. Likewise, in Siena, the city brothel was located at a regulated site behind the city hall near the market, to some extent out of sight, but certainly under the strict control of city authorities, who also maintained the gallows in the same area.139Nevola, 2007, p. 125; for the location of capital punishment and Porta Giustizia, see Loseries, 2008, p. 425. Evidence throughout the fifteenth century shows that prostitutes worked more widely around the city; in January 1462, for example, new rules drafted by the ufficiali di custodia, a group of officials charged with policing public space, banned prostitutes from operating out of two inns, the Albergo della Corona and Ospizio dell’Austro, both of them near the church of San Donato, close to the city’s main street.140Nevola, 2007, pp. 116–28; documents in Ceppari, 1994. The following year further measures were taken to remove the ‘dishonest’ activities of prostitution and gambling from the area behind the piazza Tolomei and the church of San Cristoforo, with the threat of property confiscation for any offenders who did not vacate their premises or desist from their activities.141Nevola, 2007, p. 125; ASS, Consiglio Generale, 230, fols 68–9. In 1506 funding was provided to restore the brothel, as prostitutes were no longer using it, with a consequent loss of earnings to the city: ASS, Balìa, 253, fol. 232 (15 September 1506); funds were to be raised from a tax levied on builders, and licence fees of 30 soldi were renewed for prostitutes.
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Description: Nova pulcherrimae civitatis Florentiae topographia accuratissime delineata, detail...
61. The Mercato Vecchio, Florence, between the Baptistery (top left) and Orsanmichele (bottom right), detail from an engraving by Stefano Buonsignori, Nova pulcherrimae civitatis Florentiae topographia accuratissime delineata, 1584 (repr. Rome, 1690), Harvard Map Collection, Harvard University Library, Cambridge, MA.
In Ferrara a rather complex picture emerges in the fifteenth century, where there were at least three main brothels, on the northern, southern and western edges of the city. These were quite small establishments, often attached to taverns, which provided insufficient rooms; proposals were therefore made in 1490 and 1491 to create a larger, purpose-built brothel that might be more effectively managed.142For the planned brothel, proposed by the official in charge of tax revenue (bollette), Giacomo Prisciani, but never built, see Ghirardo, 2001, pp. 412–18; the three existing brothels were in Sesto San Romano behind the cathedral, in contrada Santa Croce, and near contrada San Biagio. Following the demolition of the tavern and associated brothel of El Gambaro to make way for one of Ercole d’Este’s urban expansion and street-straightening projects in 1498, it appears that the main area designated for prostitutes emerged around via delle Volte, on the city’s southern edge. Here the focus of the city’s sex trade appears to have found a more permanent setting, among the taverns and bath-houses, and far from the grand new Addizione Erculea urban expansion to the north. That such was the case is reinforced by a provision of 1501, reported by an anonymous diarist, that ‘public whores must stay [in the area] behind the Hospital of Sant’Agnese in Ferrara [around via delle Volte], and those who own the houses can rent them to whores, but they cannot live elsewhere, on penalty of being whipped through [the streets of] Ferrara.’143Ghirardo, 2001, pp. 415–17 (quotation, p. 415); the area apparently retained this use well into the 20th century.
While accusations and prosecutions show that prostitutes continued to operate outside specified areas, the gradual process that sought to restrict their activity to specific parts of cities continues to be documented throughout the sixteenth century. An interesting example comes from the port city of Genoa, where the historic brothel in Montalbano – a working-class district on the northern edge of the city – was displaced in 1551–2 as part of the large-scale patrician urban renewal project that led to the creation of the palace-lined showpiece of the strada Nuova.144Gorse, 1997, p. 307; Stevens Crawshaw, 2016. The city authorities funded the construction of a new brothel in the relatively nearby area of Castelletto, adjacent to the city walls, despite opposition from the friars of San Francesco, who complained of the dishonour that would be brought to their neighbourhood.145Stevens Crawshaw, 2016, pp. 165–71 (though the proximity of the new brothel to the old one is not signalled). Copious legislation, echoing the concerns expressed in other cities, determined that prostitutes should be confined to this designated space, which was carefully regulated and taxed by communal officials; however, evidence indicates that, as elsewhere, prostitution continued to flourish in other parts of Genoa, including centrally located streets such as vico Stella (behind the strada Nuova) and vico Mezzagalera.146For legislation and two examples of infringement, see ibid., p. 171.
The situation in Rome matches the same pattern, albeit the high numbers of prostitutes and the unique position of the city as the centre of the Church and capital of the Papal States led to more extreme expressions of the urge to confine and prosecute the sex trade. Before the mid-sixteenth century, prostitution in Rome had not been concentrated in any one area, though the situation changed rapidly with the election of reformist pope Pius V (1566–72), who sought to create a single ghetto-like precinct to which all the city’s prostitutes were required to move.147Cohen, 1998; Storey, 2008, pp. 67–94. I luoghi (‘the places’) where they were confined centred on the area of Ortaccio, around piazza degli Otto Cantoni, a part of the Campo Marzio between the Tiber and piazza del Popolo that was increasingly urbanised through the sixteenth century; initial implementation included the creation of a fully gated area, though, after this was abandoned, prostitutes remained concentrated in this precinct well into the seventeenth century.148Storey, 2008, pp. 73–81, with map. City census documents from 1600 show that the majority of the city’s prostitutes were resident in i luoghi, while a sample of 1607 interestingly shows a process of internal stratification, with smaller numbers of wealthier courtesans living on the more elegant streets (for example, via Ferratina and via Lata) and larger concentrations at the heart of the Ortaccio area, in the proximity of the Porto di Ripetta.149Ibid., pp. 88–94, and table 1.
In all these cases, then, we can observe a tension between the creation and maintenance of establishments or zones designated for prostitutes to work in and the erosion of these by non-compliance. Purpose-built brothels appear in the majority of cases to have given way to denominated zones, the spatial and sensory boundaries of which needed to be policed. New forms of control were required to manage the revenue derived from the permits issued to prostitutes, as well as, of course, to maintain decorum. So, for example, in Florence during the fifteenth century, Nicholas Terpstra has persuasively argued that, as prostitution ceased to be contained in the designated enclave in the Mercato Vecchio, significant concerns emerged to separate those areas lived in by prostitutes from the urban blocks occupied by religious houses; in 1454 a law was passed forbidding prostitutes from operating anywhere within 300 braccia (c. 175 metres) of convents and monasteries, and this was reissued repeatedly through the 1470s and 1480s.150Terpstra, 2015b, p. 76. By the following century, as multiple streets where prostitutes could live and work were listed, the boundaries were reduced to 100 braccia, creating ever harder edges for the spatial control of the city, by both elected officials and citizen denouncers.151Terpstra, 2015b, pp. 76–8; the argument is expanded and developed, using compelling evidence from GIS-based mapping, in Terpstra, 2016. Terpstra has suggested that this reduction in distance should be viewed as evidence of a growing concern on the part of the authorities to reduce the day-to-day impact on religious and secular residents living in the proximity of prostitutes, as expressed particularly through the prosecution of noise.152Terpstra, 2016, pp. 116–19, with map, p. 112. As opposed to concentrating on licences, sumptuary rules or other legal requirements, prosecutions by the onestà from the early 1560s reveal an overwhelming drive to pursue charges resulting from shouting, insults, brawls and assaults that disturbed neighbourhood life – very much the same sort of issues that motivated the activities of the onoranza in nearby Arezzo.153Ibid., p. 118, shows that half of the 207 prosecutions between May 1560 and September 1562 were for noise-related offences; see also Storey, 2008, ch. 4, where almost 33 per cent of cases prosecuted by the birri in 1594–1606 were noise-related (table 3).
In the spatial tussle for access to and use of the streets, we can again observe – as in the wider practice of denunzie discussed earlier – how legislative measures and formal policing were heavily dependent on the distributed network of citizens, who observed and reported on what was happening in the streets and houses around them. We see, then, how social practices and the uses of urban space might be regulated by the centrally imposed, vertical exercise of authority, which was to a degree dependent on pervasive and horizontal community practices of surveillance.
There was, moreover, a visual language of urban space – signs and symbols that communicated this mutually reinforcing process of exclusion and surveillance. As has been shown here, the streets – often well-defined areas of narrow alleys – could themselves be defined as zones of confinement, and from the sixteenth century a similar model was adopted for the segregation of faith communities, especially of Jewish residents in a number of cities.154See, for instance, from an extensive bibliography, Calabi, Galeazzo and Massaro, 2016; Siegmund, 2006; Stow, 2007. The creation of these designated residential areas – which eventually took the name ‘ghetto’ from the well-known Venetian example – can be seen to follow a similar process to the one documented here for the confinement and control of prostitution. Street-level anxieties led from a relatively open spatial regime in at least some fifteenth-century cities to more systematic bricks-and-mortar enclosure in many cities during the following century. These areas might have fixed edges – gates or streets that could be closed off – but their perimeters could also be marked by signage that established the boundaries for certain practices and behaviours.155Discussed further in Chapter 5. More generally, the everyday forms of urban residential architecture – with windows and balconies overlooking the open spaces of streets and piazzas – created the natural conditions for observation, as part of a horizontal and distributed practice of enforcement exercised by many.156For instance, Cohen, 1998.
Returning to the example of Antonio Rinaldeschi discussed at the outset, an analysis from street level frames surveillance in the city as a complex overlapping system, where architecture, institutions and participatory systems of self-surveillance controlled behaviour. The urban fabric of city streets in early modern Italy provided the dynamic structure for the performance of everyday life – a ‘representational space’ as Henri Lefebvre would have it – and this was an arena subject to the collective gaze of the polity.157Lefebvre, 1991. Surveillance of urban public space has been discussed in terms of observation and visibility – from above and below – and the control that it exercised also worked in multiple directions. Rather than follow Foucault’s neat break between the performative violent justice of the Middle Ages and the subtle surveillance of the Enlightenment state, we should instead consider both to be at work in the early modern city.158Foucault, 1977.
Performative justice and city streets
The workings of distributed horizontal networks of surveillance in coexistence with the vertical exercise of authority and its performance in public space, are revealed in a remarkable incident that took place in Bologna after the reconquest of the city by Julius II in October 1506, and the exile of the ruling Bentivoglio family.159For this example, see Rospocher, 2015, pp. 185ff. For Bentivoglio and architecture, see Chapter 1; Clarke, 1999, pp. 405ff. Extensive resistance to the papal presence in the city, and the punitive force with which the Bentivoglio and their allies were exiled while their properties were expropriated and even demolished, is well documented.160Rospocher, 2015, pp. 173ff; resistance is documented in von Moos, 1978. One less well-known manifestation of resistance appeared in the form of anonymous notices (scrittarini) that were distributed around the city during 1507; in August of that year one diarist recorded that such papers were ‘spread about the city, affixed to various public places’, bearing ‘rough and unguarded verses, of an extremely satirical nature’.161Rospocher, 2015, p. 185, citing the account of Giovan Francesco Negro. The verses addressed issues such as food shortages and the city’s loss of liberty, bemoaning the fate of the Bentivoglio and accusing the pope and ecclesiastical authorities – described as pritaci (a pejorative form of ‘priest’) – for these and other problems.
The ruling authorities were quick to crack down on the perpetrators of these subversive texts and their public distribution throughout the public spaces of the city (scriptarinos seu cedulas per civitatem): a provision of 2 August promised a 200 ducat reward to anyone who provided information sufficient to unmask and bring the offenders into custody. Evidently unsuccessful, it was followed by a further provision, on 28 September, specifically describing the ‘one or more individuals who have spread and continue to spread throughout the city of Bologna’ these seditious texts.162Ibid., p. 187. The town crier was charged with announcing the legislative measure and (now) a 100 ducat reward for the capture of the perpetrators.
Thus, in this first phase, we can observe the war of words played out in the streets of the city. Here, the threat posed to the authorities was not only that of critical and subversive utterances, but the fact that these were expressed in the form of the written word, distributed and affixed in urban public spaces for all to see. Though ephemeral, this public and visual contestation of authority was fiercely opposed by the new ruling authorities, and the legislative response was also communicated publicly through the pronouncements of the town crier. In turn, of course, the action of the town crier (and the reward) appealed to the established distributed networks of citizen surveillance to secure information that could not otherwise be gathered. As such, it was the public space of the street – as the space within which information, gossip, and reputations were formed and exchanged – that was both the venue for the criticism of the new regime and for its policing.
In the event, at least one perpetrator was identified, a notary and supporter of the Bentivoglio faction called Ercole Ugolotti, who was captured and brought to the chief of police (podestà) on 2 October 1507; he was tried immediately and punished with the highest available penalty of execution, enforced by public hanging on 4 October.163Ibid., following Fileno della Tuata’s contemporary account. This very public punishment took place on the feast day of San Petronio (a significant date in the civic devotional calendar, as the Bolgnese chose Petronio over Peter as their patron saint) from the balcony of the palace of the podestà on the piazza Maggiore facing the monumental church dedicated to the city’s patron (fig. 62, and see fig. 21). The macabre spectacle of Ugolotti’s hanging body was invested with additional communicative meaning by two signs attached to his feet; these spelled out his crimes, including the distribution of the scrittarini and damage to public papal insignia. Clearly this act of performative justice was particularly effective, as it took place on one of the city’s most important feast days, when crowds of citizens would have passed through the main civic public space as they made their way into the church of San Petronio. Displayed from the prominent balcony of the palace that represented the city’s law enforcement, Ugolotti’s body and the written texts affixed to it made a powerful show of papal authority as a deterrent to its critics.
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Description: The hanging of Jacome dei Sancti by de'Corvi, Stefano
62. Stefano de’ Corvi, pen and ink sketch depicting the hanging of Jacome dei Sancti on 3 February 1560, from a book of the dead recording executions in Bologna, Fondo Ospedale, Ms. 7, fol. 70 , Biblioteca Comunale, Bologna. The criminal is shown with his hands tied behind his back, hanged from the balcony of the Palazzo del Podestà, the traditional site for the public execution of criminals in Bologna.
As with the crime and punishment of Antonio Rinaldeschi, so too with the events involving Ercole Ugolotti, the public arena of the city’s streets was both the site of the initial crime and the mechanism through which the authorities were able to gather information that led to the capture of the offender; from this distributed, urban-scale network, the operation of justice then moved to an institutional, centralised site of authority, where punishment was enacted as a public performance, to be observed by the urban community from the level of the street. Not all capital punishment in Italian cities at this period was enacted in central locations, but it is notable that executions whose purpose was most to act as deterrents (where there was often a political dimension to the crime) tended to be performed in these more central urban settings.164For the performative qualities of rituals of justice in Renaissance Italy, see Falvey, 2008. In Rome, for instance, while multiple sites were used for executions, the two most common were on the Capitoline hill, the site of secular civic authority, and at the piazza di Ponte, across the river from the Vatican precinct and the papal fortress of Sant’Angelo.165Ingersoll, 1985, pp. 419–48; Rebecchini, 2013. Public executions might also be meted out at the actual site of the crime, but the majority tended to be performed at these two main sites, and during the sixteenth century the latter emerged as the primary venue for capital punishment, in line with the concentration of authority in the hands of the papacy.166Ingersoll, 1994, pp. 183–6.
There is some evidence that the urban design of the bridgehead location, dominated by the mass of the increasingly militarised Sant’Angelo on the Vatican side and the projecting trident of streets leading into the city on the other (see fig. 27), was consciously developed to accentuate the visual impact of the piazza di Ponte as the site for the macabre ritual spectacle of executions.167Ingersoll, 1994; Rebecchini, 2013, pp. 165–8. The nearby prison of Tor di Nona made this a practical location, but the papal symbolism of the huge sculptures of Sts Peter and Paul that flanked access to the bridge, and the purpose-built compound where executions took place and bodies were displayed, suggest a deliberate purpose to increase the exercise of papal authority in a visible location projected towards the city (see fig. 55). A fast-growing number of executions were performed at the site through the sixteenth century, in which the confraternity of San Giovanni Decollato managed the ceremonial process of accompanying and comforting the condemned.168Statistics indicate an almost fourfold rise in executions at the site between the period 1499–1550 (average 17 per year) and the period 1550–1600 (average of 20–35 per year), peaking in 1585 and 1586 during the reign of Sixtus V (almost a hundred per year); Ingersoll, 1994, pp. 183–6; see also Ingersoll, 1985, pp. 408–48; Edgerton, 1979. It was such confraternities that managed the ‘horrific performance’ of complex ceremonies, in which offenders were brought in procession from their place of incarceration to the site of punishment; these events formed a regular part of urban ritual life (fig. 63).169Ingersoll, 1985, p. 426, quoting an avviso of 1571 that describes the piazza di Ponte as ‘the stage’.
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Description: Study for an Execution Scene by Carraci, Annibale
63. Annibale Carracci, Study for an Execution Scene, c. 1595, pen and ink on paper, Royal Library, Windsor Castle.
The same kind of procession was common in cities throughout Italy, and an array of centrally located sites of punishment inside city walls, as well as outside city gates, became well-known landmarks in the urban topography. Sites of execution tended to be chosen for their visibility, and the routes to them and public spaces around them accentuated the efficacy with which they communicated the strong arm of justice to urban communities. Confraternities such as San Giovanni Decollato (Rome), Santa Maria della Morte (Bologna), the Compagnia dei Neri of Santa Maria della Croce al Tempio (Florence) and the Scuola di San Fantin (Venice), as well as numerous others across the peninsula, were established as comforterie (‘comforters’), and the processions they arranged made tangible the connections between the multiple sites of authority in the city.170Terpstra, 2008a; Terpstra, 2015a, pp. 8ff. It has been noted that executions in Bologna tended to take place on market day to ensure good crowds, and, in this context, one of the tasks of the confraternities was to provide what Terpstra has described as a ‘sensory cocoon’ between the condemned and the ruckus of the procession of which they were the focus; the need for this service is itself evidence of the volume of crowds that gathered on these occasions.171Terpstra, 2015a, p. 13. With the public hanging of criminals such as Ugolotti, then, the primary site of the administration of everyday justice and law enforcement became the stage for the performance of the ultimate expression of that authority. Here, the centralised workings of authority structured space and its use, a representation of space – in Lefebvre’s terms – that articulated clearly where power resided and how justice was administered.172Lefebvre, 1991. On these occasions the meanings and purpose of government-promoted urban renewal became explicit, so that streets and public spaces became a recognisable technology of surveillance and control.
 
1     Connell and Constable, 1998, p. 90, doc. 3 (Entrata, uscita, debitori, creditori e ricordanze, Berkeley, University of California, Bancroft Library, Ms. 54, fol. cxxxi recto). »
2     The definitive account of the Rinaldeschi case is Connell and Constable, 1998; see also Connell and Constable, 2005; Sebregondi and Parks, 2011, p. 255. For a discussion of the panel and the church, see Holmes, 2013, pp. 99–103. »
3     Connell and Constable, 1998, p. 62. »
4     For the Fico, and tavern culture more broadly, see Rosenthal, 2015b. »
5     The definitive work is Murray, 2000. »
6     Connell and Constable, 1998. »
7     For the otto di guardia, see Terpstra, 2008b. »
8     Terpstra, 2015a. »
9     For defenestration and the public performance of justice (and the recording of such events through painted images – pitture infamanti), see Edgerton, 1985, pp. 91–124, which deals only with Florence; see also Freedberg, 1989, pp. 246–63; Terry-Fritsch, 2015. »
10     Connell and Constable, 1998. »
11     Ibid., pp. 77–80; for a similar argument for the prosecution of sodomy, see Rocke, 1996. »
12     Connell and Constable, 1998, pp. 80–88; Holmes, 2013, pp. 99, 164. »
13     Connell and Constable, 1998, p. 53. »
14     Ibid., p. 90, doc. 3. »
15     Trachtenberg, 1997. »
16     On ‘panopticism’ and surveillance, see Foucault, 1977, pp. 195–228; Foucault, 2007, pp. 1–28. »
17     From a sizeable bibliography on fortification, see Adams and Pepper, 1986; Pepper, 2000. »
18     Pollak, 2010. »
19     This is a key argument of Pollak, 2010. »
20     Gardner, 1987; Tracy, 2000. »
21     Pollak, 2010, pp. 178ff. »
22     For ‘new military urbanism’, which connects historical precedents in such a way as to describe a ‘digital medieval’, see Graham, 2010, pp. 142–5. »
23     On identity and mobility, see Groebner, 2007, pp. 171–221. »
24     From a vast bibliography on these frescoes, see Starn, 1994, p. 70 (and for the juxtaposed Timor, see p. 42). »
25     For example, Gardner, 1987; Israels, 2008; Robin, 1985. »
26     For a sample, see Davies and Hemsoll, 2004, pp. 241–70. »
27     Kostof, 1992. »
28     For the origins of the ‘military street’, see Pollak, 2010, pp. 180–81. »
29     Infessura, 1890, p. 79. »
30     Re, 1920, p. 32, citing Infessura, 1890, pp. 79–80. »
31     For instances in 1472 and 1474, in which a total of nearly 5,000 florins were siphoned off from the university budget to pay for building projects, see Blondin, 2005, p. 9; see also Spezzaferro, 1973, p. 39. »
32     Ait, 1991, p. 885. »
33     Spezzaferro, 1973; Tafuri, 1984b. »
34     For Ponte Sisto, see Blondin, 2005, pp. 14–20; Schraven, 2011. For Ponte Sant’Angelo, see Ait, 1991, pp. 883, 885; for work on the bridge following the 1450 stampede that led to the death of hundreds of pilgrims, see Burroughs, 1982; Davies, 2016. »
35     Ait, 1991, p. 885, citing Gherardi da Volterra, 1904, p. 92. »
36     See also Modigliani, 1998, pp. 207–8. The area was associated with the performance of papal justice, as discussed in the last section of this chapter; see also Ingersoll, 1994; Rebecchini, 2013, pp. 165–9. »
37     For the stampede and discussion of improvements, see Burroughs, 1982, pp. 97–8. »
38     Ingersoll, 1994, p. 179, discusses subsequent phases of fortification of Castel Sant’Angelo under Nicholas V and Alexander VI, which preceded its definitive organisation with elaborate bastions. »
39     On the significance of the site, see Burroughs, 1982. For a Foucauldian interpretation of the tridente, see Ingersoll, 1994; Pollak, 2010, pp. 182–4; Rebecchini, 2013, pp. 165–9. »
40     Cafà, 2010, pp. 440–42. »
41     For the political negotiations around the Capitoline, articulated through the display of sculpture, see Burroughs, 1990. »
42     Statutes to enforce the demolition of overhangs in Siena, Pisa and Florence are discussed in Balestracci and Piccinni 1977, pp. 92–3; see also Friedman, 1992. »
43     Nevola, 2007, pp. 91–113. »
44     Ibid., and table 4, p. 209; the full dataset covers the period 1431–80, but almost all the records relate to 1460–80. »
45     For a case-by-case analysis of ornato interventions, see Pertici, 1995; see also Nevola, 2007, 91–113. »
46     Lees, Slater and Wyly, 2013; Tonkiss, 2013; explored further in Chapter 4. See also Hills, 2010. »
47     For Pius’ interference and advice to the Sienese government, see Nevola, 2007, pp. 59ff. »
48     For Viterbo, see Nevola, 2008, with earlier bibliography; Pacciani, 1985, pp. 79–80; Valtieri, 1980, pp. 27–8. »
49     Müntz, 1878–82, vol. 1, p. 300; Valtieri, 1980, pp. 27–8. Relevant documents record a series of twenty-four payments, 15–21 June 1462, ASR, Camerale 1: Tesoreria Segreta (Entrata, uscita), 1288, fols 104–6; the first entry, on fol. 104r, makes clear that these were charitable gifts commanded by the pope in reparation for damage done to people’s property. »
50     Piccolomini, 1984, pp. 1594–5 (Book VIII, ch. 8). »
51     Ibid., pp. 1600–02. For an interpretation of Pius’ Corpus Christi procession as an expression of papal sovereignty, see Prodi, 1982, pp. 922ff.; Tafuri, 1984b, p. 56. Discussed further in Chapter 1. »
52     On Leo’s entry, see Ciseri, 1990, which discusses the via Maggio route, and cites Masi, 1906, for the removal of roof and jetty overhangs; see also Nevola, 2011b, pp. 163–4. »
53     Nevola, 2011b, pp. 163–4; see also Saalman, 1990, p. 79. For the initial symbolic accenting of this route, see Shearman, 1975. For the ‘propagandistic’ value of the axis from piazza San Felice to Santa Trinità, and the placement of columns there dedicated to peace and justice, see Spini, 1976. »
54     Discussed further in Chapter 4. »
55     Welch, 1995, p. 38, citing Santoro, 1969; for humanist praise of street improvement and bridge-building commissioned by Sixtus IV, see Blondin, 2005. »
56     For frontager rules on street maintenance in Siena, see Nevola, 2007, p. 17; on ancient Roman precedents, see Robinson, 1992. »
57     Santoro, 1969, p. 257. Francesco Sforza’s legislation of 1459 had introduced brick paving, which had become rapidly worn; for regulations to replace this with stone, see Martinis, 2008, p. 41 n. 30; see also Patetta, 1997. »
58     Martinis, 2008, pp. 40–41, 104, and Appendix 7. »
59     For other examples where civic or parish projects might be represented as ducal through conspicuous display of Sforza arms, see Welch, 1995, ch. 2; for the plague church of San Cristoforo sul Naviglio, see ibid., pp. 32–3. »
60     Ibid., pp. 175, 178; for the general practice adopted for the fortification of subject towns, paid from taxes, see ibid., pp. 173–5. »
61     Ibid., p. 38; Martinis, 2008, p. 15; Soldi Rondinini, 1983. A rule was introduced on 4 April 1492 to clear all overhangs and structures (including window shutters) that invaded public space, and this was renewed after Milan fell to the French; Santoro, 1969, pp. 257–8. »
62     Welch, 1995, p. 176. »
63     Rubinstein, 1993. »
64     Iannucci, 2001, pp. 83–4 and n. 22; Arduini et al., 1970, pp. 62–3. »
65     Pasini, 2001, pp. 62–3. »
66     Ibid.; see also Petrini, 1980. »
67     Gobbi and Sica, 1982, p. 57; see also Pasini, 2001, with references to contemporary chronicles of Rimini by Tobia Borghi and Baldo Branchi. »
68     For a discussion of Sigismondo’s use of the castle in iconography of rule, see Woods-Marsden, 1989, pp. 131–3, 135; D’Elia, 2016, pp. 33–8. »
69     Rubinstein, 1993. »
70     The key work is Tafuri, 1973; see also Tafuri, 1992. »
71     For some examples of the activating power of ritual on the built form of streets, see Çelik, Favro and Ingersoll, 1994a. »
72     Discussed above; see also Ciseri, 1990, pp. 44–54. »
73     The underpinning philosophical key for hegemonic theories of surveillance is Foucault, 1977, which in turn relies on Bentham, 1995. »
74     For example, Minton, 2009; Graham, 2010. »
75     For the ‘digital medieval’, see Graham, 2010, p. 145, citing Holston and Appadurai, 1999, p. 13. »
76     On CCTV, see, for example, Lyon, 2001. »
77     Jacobs, 1961, pp. 29ff. »
78     Foucault, 1977, pp. 3–7, 195–228 (quotation, p. 214). »
79     Ibid.; Foucault, 2007, pp. 1–28. »
80     On the use of crime for social history, and particularly for the sort of micro-histories of how space was used, see Muir and Ruggiero, 1994; Cohen, 2004. »
81     ASS, Concistoro, 2163 (Suppliche di carcerati), 1463–80. »
82     ASS, Concistoro, 2163, fols 182–3, 1473. In Arezzo, night-time gambling carried penalties ten times those levied in the day: ASA, Antico Comune – Statuti e capitolazioni: 16, 1503, 3.xl, fol. 111. »
83     For night-time and violence, see Ekirch, 2005, pp. 61–90; Koslofsky, 2011. »
84     This paragraph is based on the account in ASS, Concistoro, 2163, fol. 152, Annunciation 1468. »
85     For the shops in this central part of Siena, see Nevola, 2007, pp. 124–8; for the barber on the Campo, see p. 92. »
86     For the use of light in policing, see Koslofsky, 2011, p. 133. On the policing work of the podestà, see Dean, 2007, pp. 11–13; Ikins Stern, 1994, pp. 74–86; Zorzi, 1994. »
87     ASS, Concistoro, 2163, fol. 132. »
88     Ibid., fol. 135. »
89     Ibid., fols 153, 179, (relating to amnesties in 1478 and 1482). »
90     Ibid., fol. 213. A similar theft from a vegetable garden was pardoned at Christmas 1463; ibid., fol. 83v. »
91     Ibid., fol. 179. »
92     Ibid. The other members of the gang were also caught, jailed and pardoned; fols 182–3. »
93     Ibid., fol. 153v. »
94     Ibid. »
95     Ibid., fol. 140v. »
96     Ibid., fol. 152v, 1468. »
97     ASS, Concistoro, 2157, fol. 37, with additional information from fols. 38, 57, 62. The case is discussed in greater detail in Nevola, 2013b, pp. 85–9. »
98     For brief comments on accusations, see Dean, 2007, pp. 17–20; see also Zorzi, 1994, pp. 44–8. Denunciation (and its correlate, defamation) as a process is explored in its Venetian context in de Vivo, 2007, pp. 86–114; see also Horodowich, 2005. Little attention is given to the physical process of depositing denunciations and its spatial implications. For a broader picture of the construction of reputation (fama) in public space, see Fenster and Smail, 2003a, and essays therein, esp. those by Chris Wickham and Thomas Kuehn. »
99     De Vivo, 2007, ch. 3: ‘City’. »
100     Ibid., pp. 86–114; Horodowich, 2005; for gossip in Venice, see Cowan, 2011. For balconies and other privileged sites for the spreading of gossip, see Chapter 6. »
101     The term is taken from Zygmunt Bauman, who uses it to describe conditions operating in contemporary society, by which individuals opt in through adoption of such technologically enabled tools as smartphones with GPS; Bauman and Lyon, 2013. »
102     Terry-Fritsch, 2013. »
103     Ibid., p. 166. »
104     Zorzi, 1983, p. 54. In Venice it appears that denunciations had to be signed and witnessed by two people; Horodowich, 2005; for little boxes as more informal precursors of the bocche, see also Rospocher, 2015, p. 194. »
105     Rospocher, 2015, p. 194. »
106     ASS, Regolatori, 254, 1455–90, and Ufficiali di custodia: Deliberazioni, 29, 1535–6, gather denunciations from the entrance to the Palazzo del Podestà; for further documentary references to boxes in the cathedral and city hall in 1498, see Jackson, 2010, p. 457. »
107     For an initial discussion of the public and participatory nature of disciplinary power, see Nevola, 2013b, pp. 101–5, which closely aligns with the conclusions reached independently in Terry-Fritsch, 2013, pp. 169–72. »
108     For an assumption of the anonymous nature of the accusation process, see Dean, 2007, p. 18 (which does not cover the physical process of depositing accusations); that the system was abused is documented through vandalism (to boxes in churches in Prato, Arezzo, Pisa and Empoli), as well as cases of false accusations; Terry-Fritsch, 2013, pp. 172–3. »
109     ASS, Ufficiali di sanità, 1; Tre segreti sopra le vesti, 1–3. »
110     ASS, Regolatori, 254, 1455–90; the accusations are skewed to fiscal impropriety, as the regolatori were officials who primarily oversaw city expenditure and accounts. »
111     Ibid., fol. 258, 31 November 1477; for other instances, see fol. 262r–v, 24 October 1482, fol. 290v, 10 February 1488. »
112     Ibid., fol. 253r, 20 April 1478; on sumptuary laws in Siena, see Jackson, 2010. »
113     Milner, 2013. »
114     For examples of regular pronouncements regarding behaviour in public spaces, see Milner, 2013, pp. 145–7, doc. 11, 5 November 1482. »
115     Milner, 2013, p. 120. »
116     Ibid., pp. 123–4. »
117     Ibid., pp. 126–8. »
118     Ibid., p. 144, doc. 8. »
119     These denunzie were by no means unique expressions of the horizontal practice of surveillance at this period; for example, the discussion of the catasto tax returns (Kent and Kent, 1982, pp. 24–74, esp. 48–66 on ‘the atmosphere of the neighborhood’, exploring the effects on taxation of neighbourhood relationships) and participation in local government or lay religious confraternities in 15th-century Florence (Eckstein, 1995) underlines the degree to which enforcement was partly assured by the extent to which everyone knew their neighbours’ affairs. For the practice of horizontal surveillance, as applied to reputation, see also Wickham, 2003, p. 26. »
120     Ghirardo, 2001; Mazzi, 1991; Storey, 2008, pp. 17–18; Terpstra, 2015b. For a broader discussion of the scholarship in relation to spatial approaches, see Nevola, 2013a, p. 1337. »
121     Canosa and Colonnello, 1989. For Florence, see Brackett, 1993; Mazzi, 1991; Rocke, 1996. »
122     Rexroth, 2007, pp. 189–217, 266–303. As is shown in Rocke, 1996, the ufficiali della notte were overwhelmingly concerned with policing sodomy, though in terms of spatial dynamics their surveillance of urban space was similar to that of other agencies. »
123     ASA, Antico Comune – Ufficiali dell’onoranza: 1, 1564–93. »
124     ASA, Antico Comune – Statuti e capitolazioni: 16, 1503, 3.liv, fol. 114. Similar legislation was repeated in 1580; ASA, Antico Comune – Statuti e capitolazioni: 31; Statutorum Aretii 1580, 1.lxv, fol. 74. »
125     Ibid. »
126     Ghirardo, 2001, p. 405 (for Ferrara); Mazzi, 1991, p. 293 (for Florence). »
127     ASA, Antico Comune – Ufficiali dell’onoranza: 1, 1564–93, fol. 20v (22 September 1565), fol. 62r (17 May 1571). »
128     Ibid. »
129     Ibid., fol. 77v (8 August 1577), specifies the precise section of borgo a Piano (today via Piana), as delimited by the intersections of neighbouring streets. »
130     Ibid., fol. 56v (14 November 1570), fol. 61r (14 May 1571), fol. 77v (8 August 1577) for reiteration of the law that required a ribbon of at least one braccio in length to be displayed on the head or breast. »
131     Ibid., stated in various instances, including fol. 61r (14 May 1571). »
132     Ibid., fol. 41r (21 January 1566) though fol. 41v documents a renewed accusation (6 May 1567). »
133     Ibid., fol. 2 (25 October 1564). »
134     Ibid., fol. 3 (28 November 1564). »
135     Ibid. »
136     Ibid. »
137     Rosenthal, 2015b, pp. 17–19; Terpstra, 2015b, pp. 75–6. »
138     Terpstra, 2010, pp. 17–20; Terpstra, 2015b, p. 76. »
139     Nevola, 2007, p. 125; for the location of capital punishment and Porta Giustizia, see Loseries, 2008, p. 425. »
140     Nevola, 2007, pp. 116–28; documents in Ceppari, 1994. »
141     Nevola, 2007, p. 125; ASS, Consiglio Generale, 230, fols 68–9. In 1506 funding was provided to restore the brothel, as prostitutes were no longer using it, with a consequent loss of earnings to the city: ASS, Balìa, 253, fol. 232 (15 September 1506); funds were to be raised from a tax levied on builders, and licence fees of 30 soldi were renewed for prostitutes. »
142     For the planned brothel, proposed by the official in charge of tax revenue (bollette), Giacomo Prisciani, but never built, see Ghirardo, 2001, pp. 412–18; the three existing brothels were in Sesto San Romano behind the cathedral, in contrada Santa Croce, and near contrada San Biagio. »
143     Ghirardo, 2001, pp. 415–17 (quotation, p. 415); the area apparently retained this use well into the 20th century. »
144     Gorse, 1997, p. 307; Stevens Crawshaw, 2016. »
145     Stevens Crawshaw, 2016, pp. 165–71 (though the proximity of the new brothel to the old one is not signalled). »
146     For legislation and two examples of infringement, see ibid., p. 171. »
147     Cohen, 1998; Storey, 2008, pp. 67–94. »
148     Storey, 2008, pp. 73–81, with map. »
149     Ibid., pp. 88–94, and table 1. »
150     Terpstra, 2015b, p. 76. »
151     Terpstra, 2015b, pp. 76–8; the argument is expanded and developed, using compelling evidence from GIS-based mapping, in Terpstra, 2016. »
152     Terpstra, 2016, pp. 116–19, with map, p. 112. »
153     Ibid., p. 118, shows that half of the 207 prosecutions between May 1560 and September 1562 were for noise-related offences; see also Storey, 2008, ch. 4, where almost 33 per cent of cases prosecuted by the birri in 1594–1606 were noise-related (table 3). »
154     See, for instance, from an extensive bibliography, Calabi, Galeazzo and Massaro, 2016; Siegmund, 2006; Stow, 2007. »
155     Discussed further in Chapter 5. »
156     For instance, Cohen, 1998. »
157     Lefebvre, 1991. »
158     Foucault, 1977. »
159     For this example, see Rospocher, 2015, pp. 185ff. For Bentivoglio and architecture, see Chapter 1; Clarke, 1999, pp. 405ff. »
160     Rospocher, 2015, pp. 173ff; resistance is documented in von Moos, 1978. »
161     Rospocher, 2015, p. 185, citing the account of Giovan Francesco Negro. »
162     Ibid., p. 187. »
163     Ibid., following Fileno della Tuata’s contemporary account. »
164     For the performative qualities of rituals of justice in Renaissance Italy, see Falvey, 2008. »
165     Ingersoll, 1985, pp. 419–48; Rebecchini, 2013. »
166     Ingersoll, 1994, pp. 183–6. »
167     Ingersoll, 1994; Rebecchini, 2013, pp. 165–8. »
168     Statistics indicate an almost fourfold rise in executions at the site between the period 1499–1550 (average 17 per year) and the period 1550–1600 (average of 20–35 per year), peaking in 1585 and 1586 during the reign of Sixtus V (almost a hundred per year); Ingersoll, 1994, pp. 183–6; see also Ingersoll, 1985, pp. 408–48; Edgerton, 1979. »
169     Ingersoll, 1985, p. 426, quoting an avviso of 1571 that describes the piazza di Ponte as ‘the stage’. »
170     Terpstra, 2008a; Terpstra, 2015a, pp. 8ff. »
171     Terpstra, 2015a, p. 13. »
172     Lefebvre, 1991. »
Chapter 3. Surveillance and the Street: Urban Form as an Instrument of Control
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