society and the sexes in the venetian republic 363
Venetian terraferma. Born in 1580, this local notable in the hinterland
southwest of Vicenza may have been Alessandro Manzoni’s model for Don
Rodrigo, the chief villain in I promessi sposi.36 Put on trial in 1605–07 for
a long, horrific series of rapes and other acts of violence against his social
inferiors; he was found guilty and sentenced to life imprisonment.37
Public and Private Spaces: Non-Elites
Romano briefly conceded that non-elite women regularly frequented the
allegedly male space in the environs of Rialto, either assisting in their
husbands’ shops or, as widows, running them.38 That is hardly the whole
story. As Monica Chojnacka has demonstrated, if not fully occupied at
home caring for children, women regularly moved on foot beyond their
residences and immediate neighborhoods on their way to and from their
places of employment, notaries’ offices, secular and ecclesiastical tribu-
nals, health-care providers’ and fortune-tellers’ places of business, and
charitable institutions. Often they had to make long detours in order to
cross the Rialto bridge, then the only way of traversing the Grand Canal
on foot. Other reasons for women’s venturing away from home included
their main recreational outlet—visiting relatives and friends, not only in
other parts of the city but also in mainland villages and towns and even
further afield—and judicial exile from Venice. Like non-elite men, they
frequently moved house.39
Several recent studies illuminate the variety of occupations pursued
by working women. Fiscal records (estimi) and confraternity registers
from 15th-century Treviso mention live-in and live-out domestic servants,
sellers of foodstuffs and other retail products, dressmakers, workers in
male relatives’ crafts and other enterprises, and the occasional carrier of
water. Full-time or in combination with other activities, they spun and
wove wool. Their jobs were seldom permanent, but neither were many
working men’s.40 In late 16th-century Venice, the registers of the Giustizia
Vecchia record 246 apprenticeship contracts for women in their mid-teens
36 Claudo Povolo, Il romanziere e l’archivista. Da un processo veneziano del ’600
all’anonimo manoscritto dei Promessi sposi (Venice, 1993).
37 Claudio Povolo, L’intrigo dell’onore: Poteri e istituzioni nella Repubblica di Venezia tra
Cinque e Seicento (Verona, 1997).
38 Romano, “Gender and the Urban Geography of Renaissance Venice,” p. 340.
39 Monica Chojnacka, Working Women of Early Modern Venice (Baltimore, 2001),
pp. 103–20.
40 Matthieu Scherman, “I lavori delle donne nella Treviso del Quattrocento,” Genesis 8
(2009), 233–46.