wayfarers in wonderland 553
Valiera’s “old” husband might well have been even older, as men at times
remarried young women in their early teens when they were in their fif-
ties or sixties. This great age gap created a different dynamic in marital
relationships, especially in terms of sex.18 Valiera, although identified as
recently married was already looking for a younger lover to satisfy her sex-
ual desires. like the young wives stuck with older lovers in many of Boc-
caccio’s novelle (and in many other renaissance literary texts), apparently
she found his limited sexual capabilities unsatisfactory and was seeking a
more passionate love and sexual pleasure elsewhere.
Thus, the handsome young dandy from Milan, Giulio, seemed to fit her
sexual desires perfectly, but via adultery rather than marriage. young Giu-
lio, however, found himself the sexual target of not just Valiera but also
of her neighbor, the young widow angela, who had noted him passing
back and forth before her neighbor’s house attempting to court the for-
mer from the street, a typical ploy of young would-be-lovers at the time.19
for although she was a widow, she too was young, probably only in her
late teens or early twenties, like many widows in Venice whose older hus-
bands had passed away. as a relatively young woman largely on her own
angela was not resigned to living the rest of her years chastely dressed in
black and saw in Giulio a perfect answer to her desires. as a foreign visi-
tor, a wayfarer, she found him a particularly attractive potential lover, for
she could enjoy him with the assurance that he would not linger or press
her for additional favors for too long, thus endangering her reputation.20
18 James c. Grubb in his Provincial Families of the Renaissance: Private and Public Life
in the Veneto (Baltimore, 1996) suggests a considerably shorter age range for gioventù in
cities of the Veneto; see pp. 4–6 and table 1, p. 221. Grubb’s sample, however, is rather
small and from a more heterogeneous social group; thus it may not accurately reflect the
gap at upper-class levels discussed for Venice. This seems more likely when one considers
that artisanal and lower class men included in his data often married at a younger age
and women in those social categories tended to marry later, thus statistically reducing the
gap. Moreover as such groups make up a larger portion of his sample, they also tend to
shorten the age gap for the whole group. for a broader perspective on this, see: ruggiero,
Machiavelli in Love, pp. 228–29 n. 20 and for gioventù in general pp. 25–40. for a general
discussion of the issues involved see eisenbichler, ed., The Premodern Teenager.
19 as women, especially upper class women in Venice, were ideally limited to their
homes aside from when they went to church (or perhaps an evening event at a convent or
other relatively public place) and even then rarely alone, passing back and forth before the
window of a woman to be wooed was a widely recognized and practiced form of courtship.
in a way windows were for upper class Venetian women one of the few breaks in their
domestic enclosure.
20 Valiera, angela’s competitor for Giulio’s favors, sums it up well, “Boys like this...
are manna from heaven... and then he’s a foreigner, which means that you can take
your pleasure with him, and afterwards he’ll leave town and no longer be underfoot.” La