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generalization also fails to account for lengthy periods in the spring and
fall when some patrician women, leaving their husbands and often their
children in the city, moved to the families’ country villas. Fiorenza Capello
Grimani, for example, was not seeking and probably did not enjoy rest
and recreation while at her natal family’s villa in Mèolo, southwest of San
Donà di Piave. Instead, she saw to the lissia—washing of draperies and
bed coverings, transported for that purpose to the country once or twice a
year—and attended to the Capello soap-making monopoly. Beyond over-
seeing planting and harvesting and arranging for the transport of food and
wine to Venice, she also supervised construction projects.19
From the late 17th century on, elite women increasingly joined men in
frequenting semi-public and public spaces: salotti (regular gatherings in
the homes of patrizie, especially wives of the procurators of San Marco),
casini (quarters rented for conversational gatherings), ridotti (gambling
establishments), and coffeehouses.20 They had additional opportunities
for cultural enrichment, available from the mid-17th century on: plays,
operas,21 and performances of sacred music by highly trained young
female musicians in the four Ospedali Grandi.22 (Unfortunately for the
connoisseur of music Coryate, who waxed ecstatic over the instrumen-
talists and an extraordinary tenor he heard at the Scuola Grande di San
Rocco on that saint’s feast day,23 the two musical venues just mentioned
had yet to appear on the Venetian cultural scene.) Abundant visual evi-
dence from the 18th century attests to the presence of elite women, dis-
guised in masks, among the socially and sexually heterogenous crowds in
Piazza San Marco during Carnival season.
19 Giovanna Paolin, Lettere familiari della nobildonna veneziana Fiorenza Capello
Grimani (1592–1605) (Trieste, 1996).
20 Elena Brambilla, “Donne, salotti e Lumi: dalla Francia all’Italia,” in Andreina De
Clementi, ed., Il genere dell’Europa. Le radici comuni della cultura europea e l’identità del
genere (Rome, 2003), pp. 57–95; Brambilla, “Dalle ‘conversazioni’ ai salotti letterari (1680–
1720),” in Maria Luisa Betri and Elena Brambilla, eds., Salotti e ruolo femminile in Italia
(Venice, 2004), pp. 545–52; Tiziana Plebani, “Socialità, conversazioni e casini nella Venezia
del secondo Settecento,” in Betri and Brambilla, eds., Salotti e ruolo femminile, pp. 153–76;
Jonathan Walker, “Gambling and Venetian Noblemen, c.1500–1700,” Past and Present 162
(1999), 28–69.
21 Ellen Rosand, Opera in Seventeenth-Century Venice: The Creation of a Genre (Berke-
ley, 1991); Edward Muir, The Culture Wars of the Late Renaissance: Skeptics, Libertines, and
Opera (Cambridge, Mass., 2007), pp. 109–48.
22 Pier Giuseppe Gillio, L’attività musicale negli ospedali di Venezia nel Settecento
(Florence, 2006); Laura Moretti, Dagli Incurabili alla Pietà: Le chiese degli ospedali grandi
di Venezia tra architettura e musica, 1522–1790 (Florence, 2008).
23 Coryate, Coryats Crudities, 1:388–91.