Introduction: Experiences of the Street in Early Modern Italy

Introduction: The Experience of the Street in Early Modern ItalyAuthor(s): Georgia Clarke and Fabrizio NevolaSource: I Tatti Studies in the Italian Renaissance, Vol. 16, No. 1/2 (Fall 2013), pp. 47-55Published by: The University of Chicago Press on behalf of Villa I Tatti, The Harvard Center for ItalianRenaissance StudiesStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/673481 .

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THE EXPERIENCE OF THE STREET IN EARLY MODERN ITALY

Introduction: The Experience of theStreet in Early Modern Italy

Georgia Clarke, Courtauld Institute of Art, London

Fabrizio Nevola, University of Exeter

ANTONIO MANETTI ’S Novella del Grasso legnaiuolo, set in Florence in 1409,

describes an elaborate trick played on the unlucky intarsia master Manetto Am-

mannatini, nicknamed “il Grasso,” by a brigata of his friends led by Filippo Bru-

nelleschi.1 The tale begins with il Grasso missing a dinner at which all his other

friends are present. His friends hatch a plan to steal il Grasso’s identity by a com-

plicated process that involves switching his name, residence, workplace, and friend-

ship network. In the space of twenty-four hours, he is sent to jail for brawling with

people who “misidentify” him, is released on bail, is brought to “his” house in Ol-

trarno (far from his own house, which was by the Duomo), and meets with a

lawyer and a priest who both confirm his identity as “Matteo.” Doped by opiates,

he is returned to his actual home, so that when he wakes up in the morning to the

familiar sound of the “Ave Maria” bells of Santa Maria del Fiore (the Duomo), he

is back in his own bed.2 He picks up the key to his workshop near the baptistry

and goes to work; confused and mesmerized by the elaborate beffa, Grasso was

unable to work out how all this had happened and decided “to leave his workshop

for a while and go to Santa Maria del Fiore, to have time to think of his own af-

fairs, and to certify better if he were Grasso or Matteo, in the recognition on the

Contact Georgia Clarke at the Courtauld Institute of Art, London ([email protected]), and Fabrizio Nevola at the University of Exeter, College of Humanities, Queen’s Building, TheQueen’s Drive, Exeter EX4 4QH ([email protected]).

We would especially like to thank Nick Terpstra for kindly agreeing to write the postscriptthat closes this cluster of articles and offers an ideal extension of the introductory comments offeredhere.

1. The text used is Antonio Manetti, Operette istoriche edite ed inedite, ed. Gaetano Milanesi (Flor-ence, 1887). An English translation can be found in Lauro Martines, An Italian Renaissance Sextet: SixTales in Historical Context, trans. Murtha Baca (New York, 1994), 171–212 and 213–41.

2. See Manetti, Operette istoriche, 77, for return to his home and reference to the bells.

I Tatti Studies in the Italian Renaissance, volume 16, number 1/2. © 2013 by Villa I Tatti: The Harvard UniversityCenter for Italian Renaissance Studies. All rights reserved. 0393-5949/2013/1612-0015$10.00

47



faces of people he met.”3 So much had the whole process disconcerted him, and

indeed wrecked his own self-image by making him a laughing stock among his

friends and in his neighborhood, that Grasso decided to leave Florence and emi-

grated to Hungary to seek his fortune.

The novella effectively reveals the spatial dimension of community and neigh-

borhood in the fifteenth-century city and the critical interaction of people and the

urban environment that constitutes the experience of urban space: themes at the

heart of this collection of articles. Il Grasso’s predicament results from a trick played

on him by the close-knit community of his male friends, his brigata, in which au-

thority figures from the legal profession, the church, as well as the urban elite

serve to reinforce and confirm the trick. Equally central to these human actors is

the stage on which the tale is played out. The identity of il Grasso is challenged by

his forcible relocation to a different area of the city, where no one recognizes him

and he is lost; more significantly perhaps, it is the soundscape of his local environ-

ment (the bells of the Cathedral sounding the “Ave Maria”) that first alerts him to

the fact that he is back home. He “tests” the fact that all has returned to its place

by leaving his house and going to his workshop near the baptistry. When the im-

mediate environment of his home and workplace is not enough to help him, he

goes for a walk to the cathedral, where in the heart of his neighborhood, and the

city itself, he is sure to see neighbors. Their recognition of him will help confirm

his identity to himself.

Manetti’s story has elicited numerous interpretations. For example, Manfredo

Tafuri memorably explored the story of il Grasso as a metaphor of the ingegno,

doublespeak, and intellectual leadership of Brunelleschi, while for Guido Rug-

giero, the tale served as a foil for a broader examination of male sodalities and

the power of corporate sociability to fashion male identities in the early modern

city.4 Valentin Groebner, in turn, has seen the tale as a way of illustrating how

facial recognition was a key to identity in premodern Europe and how easily this

identity was subject to variations and distortions.5 These interesting lines of in-

quiry are not mutually exclusive but can coexist. Each of these interpretations

3. Ibid., 84 (Nevola trans.).4. Manfredo Tafuri, Interpreting the Renaissance: Princes, Cities, Architects, trans. Daniel Sherer

(New Haven, CT, 2006), 1–3, 19–20; Guido Ruggiero, “Mean Streets, Familiar Streets, or the Fat Wood-carver and the Masculine Spaces of Renaissance Florence,” in Renaissance Florence: A Social History, ed.Roger J. Crum and John T. Paoletti (Cambridge, 2006), 295–310, with a focus on virtù. There aresignificant overlaps between Ruggiero’s more extensive discussion and analysis of the text and theversion briefly outlined here.

5. Valentin Groebner, Who Are You? Identification, Deception and Surveillance in Early ModernEurope (New York, 2007), 18–22.

48 | I TATTI STUDIES IN THE ITALIAN RENAISSANCE FALL 2013



brings an additional facet to our understanding of the layered nature of urban liv-

ing, its customs, and the transgression of these.

The experience of urban space and an inquiry into the social and spatial en-

vironment of the city are a key focus of this collection, which brings together ar-

ticles that consider the social, cultural, aural, and visual contexts of cities in early

modern Italy. A number of the articles explore the sensory environment, adapting

the subtle and nuanced methodological approach developed forty years ago by

Michael Baxandall for the contextualized viewing of Renaissance Italian paintings,

a method succinctly summarized in the concept of “period eyes.”6 Contextualiz-

ing objects in relation to contemporary written sources and decompressing the

shorthand implicit in the forms and actions represented in the art of past pe-

riods, Baxandall sought to bridge the interpretative divide between past and pres-

ent and trained a generation of scholars to view art in a new way.7 Baxandall’s ap-

proach focused on the subjectivity embedded in each authorial act. As Diane Favro

has argued, it is an approach that transfers well to the interpretation of experience

of other media, including that of the urban fabric, as it is understood by architec-

tural and urban historians.8 In this collection, many of the authors ask whether

we can get closer to the “meaning and experience” of the urban environment

using comparable methods to those that have allowed historians of art to tease out

meanings and choices that are deposited in the formulations of artists in paint-

ings and sculptures. While Georgia Clarke’s article is most evidently dependent on

Baxandall’s approach, his methodology in fact permeates the collection, providing

a baseline method for contextualizing visual experience.

In turn, urban form and how people experience it has an established place in

contemporary urban design practice: half a century ago, in the groundbreaking

Image of the City, the town planner Kevin Lynch used interview-based analysis

of contemporary cities to understand people’s experiences of the urban and the

6. Michael Baxandall, Painting and Experience in Fifteenth Century Italy: A Primer in the SocialHistory of Pictorial Style (Oxford, 1974). A useful recent discussion of the book and its impact, with aparticular emphasis on recovering Baxandall’s continued concern for style, is Paul Hills, “MichaelBaxandall’s Painting and Experience in Fifteenth Century Italy, 1972,” Burlington Magazine 153 (2011):404–8. For an exploration of how Baxandall’s male merchant bias might be corrected, see AdrianRandolph, “Gendering the Period Eye: Deschi da Parto and Renaissance Visual Culture,” Art History27 (2004): 538–62.

7. For a recent assessment of Baxandall’s method, see Patricia Lee Rubin, Images and Identity inFifteenth-Century Florence (London, 2007).

8. Diane Favro, “Meaning and Experience: Urban History from Antiquity to the Early ModernPeriod,” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 58 (1999): 364–73.

Introduction | 49



reception of city form.9 More recently, various works have explored the poten-

tial of phenomenological studies of urban space and the senses.10 These studies

usefully combine with the highly influential work that Henri Lefebvre and other

sociologists developed around the concept of urban space and how it is socially

constructed with particular meanings, collectively defined, or hegemonically im-

posed.11 As the articles in this collection show, historians are increasingly inter-

ested in looking at the experience of urban contexts in the past, and a host of sub-

jective evidence can be used to create an “experiential” sense of the city and of

urban space.12 Lefebvre’s view that space is produced by the interaction of people

and place assigns a more than passive force to place, such that it can be claimed

that significant sites in cities have a form of agency that enhances actions played

out in them.13 However, the focus on what Denis Cosgrove termed a “spatial turn”

has tended to be more on the actors and deeds played out in social space than on

the physical context that was the “stage” for such actions.14 Similarly, while Rich-

ard Trexler stated that “social spaces are central to the formation, expression and

modification of individual and group identities,” historians have focused more on

the people (individuals and groups) and much less on the spaces themselves.15

In this collection, we have sought to keep in play both the physical setting of

urban space and the social actors that perform in it. To an extent, this engage-

ment with the tangible, physical aspects of urban space is a direct result of the

creative context within which these articles first emerged: the research net-

work that Fabrizio Nevola and Georgia Clarke led, Street Life and Street Culture:

9. Kevin Lynch, The Image of the City (Cambridge, MA, 1960).10. Mirko Zardini, ed., Sense of the City: An Alternate Approach to Urbanism (Montreal, 2005).11. Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, trans. D. Nicholason-Smith (Oxford, 1991); Michel

de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life (Berkeley, CA, 1984). Some helpful observations are inSigrid Weigel, “On the ‘Topographical Turn’: Concepts of Space in Cultural Studies andKulturwissenschaften,” European Review 17 (2009): 187–201, esp. 190. On the “spatial turn” in history,see also Denis Cosgrove, “Landscape and Landschaft,” German Historical Institute Bulletin 35 (2004):57–71.

12. The approach is applied in various parts of Fabrizio Nevola, Siena: Constructing the Renais-sance City (New Haven, CT, 2007); see also Fabrizio Nevola, “ ‘Lieto e trionphante per la città’: Expe-riencing a Mid-Fifteenth-Century Imperial Triumph along Siena’s Strada Romana,” Renaissance Studies17, no. 4 (2003): 581–606. See also the excellent collection, Crum and Paoletti, Renaissance Florence.

13. An excellent example of this process is applied to the aringhiera of the Palazzo della Signoriain Florence by Stephen Milner, “The Florentine Piazza della Signoria as Practiced Place,” in Crumand Paoletti, Renaissance Florence, 83–103, 497–505.

14. Cosgrove, “Landscape,” 57–58.15. Richard Trexler, “Introduction,” in Persons in Groups: Social Behavior as Identity Formation

in Medieval and Renaissance Europe, ed. Richard Trexler, Papers of the Sixteenth Annual Conferenceof the Center for Medieval and Early Renaissance Studies, Medieval and Renaissance Texts andStudies (Binghamton, 1985), 3–16, 4.




Between Early Modern Europe and the Present.16 The network adopted a cross-

chronological approach, which brought together scholars and practitioners work-

ing on different aspects of the life and experience of streets in early modern Italy

and in contemporary Britain, providing a valuable opportunity for methodologi-

cal exchange between past and present and between connected, but different,

cultures. The result has been a dynamic discourse between specialists from his-

torical and nonhistorical disciplines that has linked the historic past and the

present. Indeed, since the public urban life of the premodern Mediterranean

world has frequently been held up as a model for the socially engaged, publicly

staged modern idea of community, we also aimed to test the potential for such

cross-chronological and cross-cultural comparisons.17 The network also sought to

engage with the numerous contemporary discourses about friction, conflict, and

antisocial behavior in relation to “street life,” with the frequent assumption by

nonhistorians that these are very modern concerns. However, Renaissance streets

could be just as edgy as those of today, with youth gangs, indecent behavior, and

violence all regularly making their appearance in written and judicial accounts.

Our aim in the network and in the articles in this collection has been to ex-

plore streets as a public arena of performance in the city, where the “social con-

struction” of space operates: streets considered as the physical places that enable,

and indeed enhance, the performances that result in identity formation.18 Streets,

in such a view, are more than “things.” They are carefully fashioned spaces that

result from the negotiated relations between public and private ownership and

the everyday and exceptional events that take place in them. Streets are also re-

positories of collective memories and rituals and, as such, become inscribed with

meanings that outlast the lives of individual actors on the urban stage.19 As a

“unit” of urban space, streets have not been much studied by urban and archi-

tectural historians.20 There are, of course, exceptions such as Tafuri’s exemplary

16. The network was funded by the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council (2008–11). Re-ports and findings can be accessed at http://www.bath.ac.uk/ace/Streetlife/.

17. In modern discourse, the form and dynamics of urban space have been idealized by botharchitectural and political theorists. See most significantly Robert D. Putnam, Robert Leonardi, andRaffaella Nanetti, Making Democracy Work: Civic Traditions in Modern Italy (Princeton, NJ, 1994),and the most recent historical reassessment of that thesis in the collection Nicholas A. Eckstein andNicholas Terpstra, eds., Sociability and Its Discontents: Civil Society, Social Capital, and Their Alter-natives in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe (Turnhout, 2009).

18. Trexler, “Introduction,” 16.19. This is a key aspect highlighted in Spiro Kostof, “The Street,” in The City Assembled: The Ele-

ments of Urban Form through History (London, 1992), 189–243, esp. 194–208.20. Most recently, see Riitta Laitinen and Thomas V. Cohen, eds., “Cultural History of Early

Modern European Streets,” special issue, Journal of Early Modern History 12 (2008).

Introduction | 51



work on urbanism in Rome, and the Via Giulia in particular, and a collection of

festschrift essays for Spiro Kostof.21 These exemplify an approach that fruitfully

combines the concerns of urban historians with social history and those of archi-

tectural historians with built forms. The Street Life network, in bringing scholars

and practitioners together to consider the social and physical fabric of streets, ex-

plored themes such as sound and gossip, ephemera and performance, surveillance

and policing. In the process, the network enabled forms of cross-fertilization re-

sembling that between anthropology and history, which informed the ground-

breaking and influential work of Richard Trexler and Edward Muir.22

This collection brings together a selection of work by the early modern schol-

ars who took part in the Street Life network’s activities. The authors seek to inves-

tigate the social space of Italy’s early modern urban streets as protagonists in a

variety of studies that address subjects from triumphal processions to the work of

town criers, from the potential surveillance functions of street shrines to acts of

violence “performed” at significant points in the city, from the powerful sound

of bells or crowds at local and at citywide levels to the temporary possession and

transformation of streets, corners, piazzas, and neighborhoods. In a number of

cases, the research for articles relies on bodies of unpublished material. However,

it is not so much new material as new questions that drive the content of this col-

lection. As editors, we encouraged our authors to explore the meaning of spatially

determined patterns that emerged from their research. The significance of physi-

cal urban space emerges from the way that many of the articles employ maps to

situate significant places and incidents.

A number of interconnected themes have emerged from the articles, and these

have helped to inform our thematic arrangement of the collection. We start with

the senses—first sound, with Niall Atkinson’s new reading of the physical, politi-

cal, and emotional soundscape of fourteenth- and early fifteenth-century Flor-

ence. Atkinson explores ways in which official and transgressive sounds—from the

tolling of bells to the shouting of crowds—could fashion and refashion both the

21. Luigi Salerno, Luigi Spezzaferro, and Manfredo Tafuri, Via Giulia: Una utopia urbanistica del’500 (Rome, 1973 ); see also Manfredo Tafuri, “ ‘Roma Instaurata’: Strategie urbane e politiche ponti-ficie nella Roma del primo Cinquecento,” in Raffaello architetto, ed. Christoph L. Frommel, StefanoRay, and Manfredo Tafuri (Milan, 1984), 56–106; and Zeynep Çelik, Diane Favro, and RichardIngersoll, eds., Streets: Critical Perspectives on Public Space (Berkeley, CA, 1994).

22. We are immensely grateful to the numerous participants at the various events we held, recordsof which can be found in the reports at http://www.bath.ac.uk/ace/Streetlife/Streetlife_archive/. Thekey studies are Richard Trexler, Public Life in Renaissance Florence (New York, 1980); and EdwardMuir, Civic Ritual in Renaissance Venice (Princeton, NJ, 1981). An application of this approach with anurban dimension is Richard Ingersoll, “Ritual Use of Public Space in Renaissance Rome” (PhD diss.,University of California, Berkeley, 1985).




sense and the government of the city. Atkinson’s approach draws on a field opened

up in the 1970s by R. Murray Schafer around the aural sensorium, or soundscape,

originally applied specifically to the contemporary urban soundscape.23 Until re-

cently, historians have largely overlooked the sonic environment of early modern

urban spaces; Reinhard Strohm’s discussion of the soundscape of late medieval

Bruges is an exemplary exception, while Alain Corbin’s study of the power of

bells in the nineteenth-century French landscape has directly informed Atkin-

son’s approach.24 Here, in relation to early Renaissance Florence, Atkinson sets

the soundscape into the architectural and urban context of the city, its neighbor-

hoods, and streets and considers the experience and impact of particular sounds

on social and political life. He also shows the importance of private speech as

part of Florentine citizens’ identity and interaction and argues that the most con-

fidential place for private words might be in the full sight of others on the public

street.

This leads us to the importance of sight and the visual, with Fabrizio Ne-

vola’s presentation of the “multioptical” engagement of rulers and citizens in the

life of fifteenth-century Siena. He shows how the maintenance or enhancement

of civic order depended on processes of observation or surveillance from and be-

tween citizens and government, rather than imposed uniquely from above. His ar-

ticle de-emphasizes Foucault’s famous notion of surveillance (“few upon many”)

in favor of a “many-to-many” model, developing parallels between twenty-first-

century surveillance techniques such as security cameras and medieval features

such as gates and towers.25 He also shows that acts of surveillance and inform-

ing were themselves often enacted within the public’s gaze because of the loca-

tion of the sites for the reception of what were, supposedly, “anonymous” de-

nunciations.

The dissemination and effects of similar denunciations are discussed in Ste-

phen Milner’s article on the Florentine banditori (town criers) of the Otto di

23. R. Murray Schafer, The Soundscape: Our Sonic Environment and the Tuning of the World(Rochester, VT, 1993), originally published as The Tuning of the World (New York, 1977). For sound-scapes in the context of urbanism, see, e.g., Emily Thompson, “Noise and Noise Abatement in the Mod-ern City,” in Zardini, Sense of the City, 190–99.

24. Reinhard Strohm, Music in Late Medieval Bruges (Oxford, 1985), 1–9; Alain Corbin, LesCloches de la terre: Paysage sonore et culture sensible dans les campagnes au XIXe siècle (Paris, 1994)(published in English as Village Bells: Sound and Meaning in the Nineteenth-Century French Country-side [New York, 1998]). Another particularly effective example is David Garrioch, “Sounds of theCity: The Soundscape of Early Modern European Towns,” Urban History 30, no. 1 (2003): 5–25. Mostrecently, see David Hendy, Noise: A Human History of Sound and Listening (London, 2013).

25. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (NewYork, 1977); and Stephen Graham, Cities under Siege: The New Military Urbanism (London, 2010).

Introduction | 53



Guardia. Milner examines newly discovered, rich archival material that records

the public exposition of government orders and private information in fifteenth-

and early sixteenth-century Florence, contributing to a growing understanding of

the early modern information economy.26 Paper records were given audible and

visible form by the city’s town criers through a ritualized sequence of declarations

that can be mapped onto the city’s streets and piazzas, adding to our understand-

ing of the relationship of language to power and to civic, urban space.

Guido Rebecchini examines Rome in the first half of the sixteenth century

and considers the power exerted by visual means on a city’s streets and piazzas

through certain highly ritualized and charged encounters and performances of

“justice.” He shows how images and portraits in public places articulated the

private and political interests of influential individuals, while also considering how

such portraits might be used against those in authority in acts of damnatio memo-

riae. Lefebvre’s concern with the constructions of social meanings of public space

and Foucault’s concept of performative justice offer interpretative keys for un-

locking the meaning of events and their staging in the streets of sixteenth-century

Rome.

As is evident to any historian of the period, the appropriation of public space

by individuals and groups was a complex issue.27 David Rosenthal’s study of male

artisan groups, or potenze (powers), on the streets of mid-sixteenth-century Flor-

ence during carnival highlights the web of interrelationships between rulers and

ruled and the fundamental importance of physical sites and markers. Territorial

occupation and ownership of city streets and piazzas—whether temporary or per-

manent—were essential components in the self-identification of the different po-

tenze; they also provided a means of negotiating relations between the potentially

powerless and the supremely powerful duke.

All of the articles in this collection are primarily dependent on historical,

written documents for their attempts to navigate the streets and piazzas of early

modern Italy. Surprisingly, the urban fabric of Bologna, which shaped the 1529

entrance of Charles V into the city, is to be noted as much by its absence as its

presence in the documents. Georgia Clarke’s discussion of accounts of the Holy

Roman Emperor’s imposing public entry into the city highlights the question of

the observational nature of “eyewitness” accounts, as represented in contempo-

rary descriptions and a set of prints of the event. Such close reading of visual

26. See, e.g., Brendan Dooley and Sabrina A. Baron, eds., The Politics of Information in Early Mod-ern Europe (London, 2001); Filippo de Vivo, Information and Communication in Venice: RethinkingEarly Modern Politics (Oxford, 2007).

27. See, e.g., Trexler, “Introduction.”




and written evidence throws into sharp relief the differences in audience’s per-

ceptions and memory of historical events and how they were recorded, and the

variations between what “eyewitnesses” say they saw, what they say they did not

see, and what they seem to have chosen to see or not to see.

While these articles deal with diverse cities—Florence, Rome, Siena, and Bolo-

gna—the underlying themes addressed may be applied more widely to early

modern cities as a whole. Just as people “performed” their identity on the street,

so too the physical fabric was fashioned, and these architectural spaces might also

be altered with temporary, ephemeral decoration or additions. As prime public

stages for identities, streets could also witness clashes of private and public inter-

ests in architectural terms as well as evanescent verbal exchanges; architecture,

as in the case of balconies and windows, was often a key vehicle for such ex-

changes.28

The modern-day visitor to such charged civic events as Siena’s Palio or the San

Giovanni Battista celebrations in Florence can still catch a glimpse of the layered

and complex meanings associated with the experience of the early modern public

realm. While the cities that have served as the focus of these essays in this collec-

tion had many characteristics in common, it is also true that, then as now, char-

acteristics of topography, visual forms, and style, as well as local customs, distin-

guished one from another, and this too was no accident.29 These articles show that

it is possible to recover some of the experiences of Italian city life: what it was like

to move around streets, to hear the sounds of bells and town criers, and to un-

derstand the complex social meanings associated with particular locations and

the surprise that ephemeral changes could elicit from local residents and visitors

alike.

28. Papers discussing the way that streets might be controlled from windows and balconies werepresented at the first Street Life Study Day (October 2009), with useful contributions to the discus-sions by Angus Carlyle, Alexander Cowan, Flora Dennis, and Elizabeth Horodowich; see the report athttp://www.bath.ac.uk/ace/Streetlife/. Some have been published elsewhere: on Venice, see AlexanderCowan, “Seeing Is Believing: Urban Gossip and the Balcony in Early Modern Venice,” Gender andHistory 23, no. 3 (2011): 721–38; and on Rome, see Elizabeth S. Cohen, “To Pray, to Work, to Hear,to Speak: Women in Roman Streets, c. 1600,” Journal of Early Modern History 12 (2008): 289–311;Flora Dennis, “Sound and Domestic Space in Early Modern Italy,” Studies in the Decorative Arts 16(2008–9): 7–19.

29. For a brief discussion of campanilismo and for an additional bibliography, see FabrizioNevola, “Introduction: Locating Communities in the Early Modern Italian City,” Urban History 37,no. 3 (2010): 349–59.

Introduction | 55



Introduction: Experiences of the Street in Early Modern Italy

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