the anthropology of venice 493
from Slovenia; hence, i was finally at the end of italy.” for Marin and
his local informants, borders mattered a great deal. Where there were no
natural borders, such as rivers or streams, the Venetians erected insignia
defining what was theirs, as they did at the town of corno di rosazzo with
a pilaster painting of St Mark. Venice in friuli was a regime of weak cen-
tral institutions but strong geographical coordinates. people knew exactly
what was where. Whatever else constituted Venetian political practice,
there was a deep sensitivity toward exactly what territories were Venice’s
and where one jurisdictional regime ended and another began.16
The UncannyThe calamities that followed the french invasion of italy in 1494 stimu-
lated Sanudo to begin a systematic record of his times, which he began
with his first diary entry on 1 January 1496. Throughout the diaries Sanudo
recorded evidence of the uncanny: omens, miracles, providential signs,
monstrous births, spirits, and witches. Sanudo’s own attitude toward these
varied. he reported without skepticism those that seemed to point to the
role of Venice in god’s providential scheme, especially during the most
difficult phases of the War of the league of cambrai from 1509 to 1517. The
most elaborate omen came from reports of vaporous visions of a combat
among dead spirits on the battlefield of Agnadello, where the Venetian
forces had been routed in May 1509. These visions, which Sanudo dutifully
recorded, transformed a folk myth of uncertain origin about armies of the
dead into a prophecy, which was later adapted for a papal propaganda
campaign. The Agnadello visions became paradigmatic of the floating-
up of a cultural motif from peasants to the highest intellectual circles in
europe.17 The anthropology of Venice was not just a trickle-down of elites
interpreting non-elites but a culture of interpenetrating idioms.
for Sanudo, the dominant interpretive frame for omens remained the
contemporary political situation. After the french took Bergamo from
16 Sanuto, Itinerario, p. 139. on the problem of Venice’s borders with the empire,
Appuhn, A Forest on the Sea, pp. 110, 174–75, 294–302. cf. Muir, Mad Blood Stirring, pp. 30,
58–60. A case i have studied elsewhere, the murder of federico di Strassoldo in 1561, reveals
the importance of precise boundaries in friuli. See also edward Muir, “The Double Binds
of Manly revenge,” in richard c. Trexler, ed., Gender Rhetorics: Postures of Dominance and
Submission in Human History (Binghamton, 1994), pp. 72–73.
17 Sanuto, I diarii, 10:48–49. ottavia niccoli, Prophecy and People in Renaissance Italy,
trans. lydia g. cochrane (princeton, 1990), pp. 61–88.