wayfarers in wonderland 559
surpassed by much 120,000 souls in the renaissance.34 But his was a tell-
ing exaggeration, for it suggests how ubiquitous and important Venetian
prostitution was perceived as being at the time. Giulio, Bandello’s charac-
ter and many non-imaginary wayfarers as well, would have found in the
city a wide range of prostitution in many ways reflecting the social and
cultural hierarchies of the city.
Much below the level of Giulio’s social pretensions there existed a
large number of women (and younger males as well) who practiced the
trade as necessity required, prostituting themselves to aid their families
or merely to survive in a city where people at the bottom of society lived
lives that were marginal in virtually every sense of the term. although the
law required prostitutes to be registered for tax purposes, these irregulars
seldom were, and thus their practice was formally illegal. They seldom
were prosecuted, however, for normally they fell below the disciplining
gaze of the authorities, and their earnings were usually too small to war-
rant the attention of government. Thus, they have left little in the way
of direct documentation in the criminal records. When they occasionally
do appear, it is usually in the context of testimony about other crimes
and the petty violence of lower-class life. suggestively, in this context they
are often described by neighbors as “good” and even “honorable” women,
which seems to indicate that those who were perceived as practicing
occasionally out of necessity to aid their families or merely survive were
relatively accepted if they lived quiet and stable lives and did not disrupt
the neighborhood.
a group of more regular prostitutes who were registered with the
authorities and paid taxes worked from the public bordello known as
the castelletto, located in a warren of small narrow calli not far from the
rialto bridge. at the time, the area was seen as a relatively self-contained
island which also was populated with baths (stue) and little rooms with
beds opening on to the street known as carampane.35 one entrance to
34 Marin sanudo, I diarii di Marino Sanuto, ed. rinaldo fulin et al., 58 vols (Venice,
1897–1903), vol. 8, col. 414. The literature on prostitution is immense. The major legislation
was published already in the 19th century: Giovanni Battista de lorenzi, ed., Leggi e
memorie venete sulla prostituzione (Venice, 1870–72). an overview of the subject with an
emphasis on courtesans was provided by the already-cited volume Il gioco di amore, with
essays by the literary scholar Giorgio Padoan, the social historian Giovanni scarabello,
and nelli elena Vanzan Marchini. for florence, richard Trexler’s archival based study still
remains a solid work, “la prostitution florentine au xVe siècle: Patronages et clienteles,” in
Annales ESC 36 (1981), pp. 983–1015. see also n. 3 above.
35 This was a dialect term apparently related to the name of the rampani family which
had once owned a palace in the area the ca’ rampani. The name then became associated