wayfarers in wonderland 569
hardly sex at all—and thus returned to prostitutes, concubines, sodomy,
or more violent pursuits, largely abandoning their wives to child rearing
and domesticity. The recent studies of Joanne ferraro and others suggest
that this was a common problem in Venice.53 for wives, in turn, the mari-
tal bed and the supposed sexual normality of marital life may in many
instances have had little to do with love, pleasure, or the erotic for that
matter, and in the end had more to do with duty and service than sex, as
was the ideal. once again criminal documents in Venice, especially those
concerned with adultery, reinforce literary accounts such as that of young
Valiera suggesting that marriage was not the most likely place to look for
sex or sexual satisfaction for many women at the time.
Valiera the young wife in the end had her sexual pleasures with the
young Giulio while the “old man” who was her husband remained invis-
ible. and her neighbor, the young widow angela, after several false starts,
also finally enjoyed the youth, as well as her servant nena, imagining that
she was in a brothel enjoying the dirty words that men spoke there. Giulio,
in turn, found his fantasy world of mannered and upper-class sexual plea-
sure in the fantasy world of his comedy, even as his unnamed lombard
comrade found his demise in similar fantasies. yet in a way, when one
seeks the reality behind their fantasies, one finds that even from a mod-
ern perspective Venice and its sexual worlds appear to be seen through
the looking glass of lewis carroll’s alice, with virtually everything relating
to sex—marriage, love, family, prostitution, sodomy, the illicit, and the
licit—slightly out of kilter and shifted to reflect back to us a suggestively
different world where the ideal and practice of sex were significantly dif-
ferent and wonder inducing for wayfarers whether they were renaissance
denizens of literature or modern scholars.
53 see on this ferraro, Marriage Wars, which also, however, documents cases of
affection and even love in marriage. My point is not that neither existed in marriage but
merely that at upper class levels, for the reasons discussed, affection was at best hoped for
and passionate love generally seen as unlikely.