Wayfarers in Wonderland:
The sexual Worlds of renaissance Venice reVisiTed1Guido ruggieroMatteo Bandello tells the tale of a young noble from lombardy who visited
Venice in the 16th century to enjoy its already famous world of illicit sex.2
attracted by reports of its elite prostitutes, he sought out one of the most
noted courtesans of the day, planning to buy her sexual services and
enjoy the special cosmopolitan sins that the commercial city had to offer.
But true to Bandello’s dark vision and perhaps his lombard antipathy
for Venice, what had the potential to be a tale of pleasure became a
cautionary tale on the dangers of Venice and that illicit world; for this
youthful adventurer found that although the beautiful courtesan that he
quickly fell madly in love with allowed him to visit her in her sumptuous
lodgings along with her other suitors, she denied him her favors.
Tellingly, he discovered that those favors were not available merely for
money; she choose who would enjoy them and who would not. in fact,
one of the things that set courtesans apart at the time was their ability
to choose only the best men as their lovers; thus making them, in a way,
1 in 1985 i published a first overview of the topic for the 14th and 15th centuries, The
Boundaries of Eros: Sex Crime and Sexuality in Renaissance Venice (new york, 1985). The
topic was revisited in the early 1990s with a more theoretical essay, “Marriage, love, sex,
and renaissance civic Morality,” in James Grantham Turner, ed., Sexuality and Gender
in Early Modern Europe: Institutions, Texts, Images (cambridge, 1993), pp. 10–30, and
a broader book, Binding Passions: Tales of Magic, Marriage and Power at the End of the
Renaissance (new york, 1993) that reconsidered and expanded into the 16th century the
discussion of sex in renaissance Venice and beyond, while considering a wider range of
topics as well. over the last decade and a half, i have continued to publish on the topic
a number of articles more focused on prostitution, sodomy, and the illicit world of sex in
the renaissance, as well as a book with a broader renaissance focus, Machiavelli in Love:
Sex, Self, and Society in the Italian Renaissance (Baltimore, 2007). over the same span of
time a number of important works by other scholars studying Venice have enriched our
understanding of the sexual life of the city; although all those studies cannot be cited here,
readers can find most of those not cited in what follows discussed in my earlier studies
along with a more general bibliography and discussion of sex in the italian renaissance.
This essay then revisits that work and attempts to present a broad overview of the topic
from a Venetian perspective while adding hopefully some new insights and suggestions.
2 Matteo Bandello, Le quattro parti de le Novelle del Bandello, ed. Gustavo Balsamo-
crivelli (Turin, 1924), part 3, novella 31.