554 guido ruggiero
angela therefore decided to aggressively beat out her younger neighbor
Valiera and get what she wanted by sending the boatman Bernardo to
pick up the youth and bring him to her. such go-betweens were a regular
and significant part of the Venetian life and illicit sex, often necessary
to arrange meetings between men seeking sexual partners and women
locked up in their homes, as in this case. When angela’s maid described
the young man to Bernardo, her description is interesting, as again her
potential lover does not quite fit what might be expected and we real-
ize once more that we are beyond the looking glass in a Venetian won-
derland, where the apparent givens of sex have again shifted away from
the expected. Bernardo asks, “Tell me, what does this guy look like?” she
replies, “he’s a young fellow still without a beard, with a rosy face and
black hair, dressed in silk and very finely.”21 later when Bernardo encoun-
ters the youth on the street, he considers his looks, “is this him? Well let’s
see: his hair is in braids and he has that feminine air of a dandy. shit it has
to be him.”22 feminine airs, a dandy, without a beard, young Giulio hardly
seems a storybook lover by modern standards. yet in the literature of the
day, warrior heroes and other apparently more masculine and forceful
lovers are regularly eschewed for youthful, beardless, feminine lovers who
are apparently so young and inexperienced that one irate older competi-
tor in another comedy for a woman’s favor remarks unhappily, “Good
God! is it possible? how could she want to be served by him? he’s more
fit for being screwed than for screwing.”23
This literary fascination with young lovers reflects another aspect of
male age distinctions observed in renaissance Venice and elsewhere that
significantly colored sexual practice within marriage and outside of it as
well. as noted earlier, upper-class men normally did not marry until their
veniexiana, p. 301. of course, this was literature, a domain where widows like angela found
it presumably easier to have such desires and act on them. still, the widespread fear of
widows’ sexual desires and sexual activities in prescriptive literature and more playful
literary forms such as comedies and novelle, suggest what is confirmed regularly in archival
documents both criminal and civil in Venice—many widows did not pass the years of their
widowhood chastely waiting for a new mate or in perpetual mourning.
21 La veniexiana, p. 294.
22 ibid., p. 296.
23 These lines are spoken in the early 16th-century italian comedy The Deceived
(Gl’ingannati), written collectively by the academy of the intronati of siena and published
in translation in Giannetti and ruggiero, Five Comedies, pp. 205–84, with this speech on
p. 233. The character speaking these lines, the sexually aggressive spanish soldier of
fortune Giglio, is referring to the heroine of the comedy who, cross-dressed as a young
boy, is serving the more mature young man she loves and, in order to win him away from
another young woman, is seducing that woman with success, adding to Giglio’s ire.