venetian architecture 759
need to adapt innovations to local building practice assisted their visual
integration into the townscape.
Similarly, the fondaci—merchants’ lodgings with warehousing on the
ground floor, both in Venice and in overseas trading concessions—are
now recognized in their pan-Mediterranean context, equivalent to the fun-
duq, wikala, (k)han, or caravanserai in various parts of the Islamic world.55
Recent studies of the Ghetto and the quarters of immigrant communities
in Venice have been complemented by a growing interest in the archi-
tecture of overseas colonies, both civic and military.56 It is curious that
the hammam or bath-house, to be found in most Venetian trading posts
in the Levant, never took root in Venice. One cannot blame this neglect
wholly on the difficulties of fresh water supply in the city, for many of the
overseas bases were located in areas with similar water shortages.
Architectural HierarchyThe hierarchy of typologies established in treatises such as those of
Alberti and Scamozzi has been brought into question by the renewed
interest in vernacular building. The pioneering study Venezia minore
by Egle Renata Trincanato, first published in 1948, laid the groundwork
for research in the field of popular housing.57 A challenging question is
the extent to which vernacular domestic architecture emulated palace
building.58 Recent studies have indicated that many of the structures that
displayed the external features of palaces were in fact built as complexes
of separate apartments for letting.59 In these ingenious structures, each
55 Ennio Concina, Fondaci: Architettura, arte e mercatura tra Levante, Venezia, e Alemagna
(Venice, 1997); Olivia Remie Constable, Housing the Stranger in the Mediterranean World:
Lodging, Trade, and Travel in Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages (Cambridge, 2003).
56 Ennio Concina, Ugo Camerino, and Donatella Calabi, La città degli ebrei: il ghetto
di Venezia: Architettura e urbanistica (Venice, 1991); Donatella Calabi, “Gli stranieri e la
città,” in Gino Benzoni and Antonio Menniti Ippolito, Storia di Venezia. Dalle origini alla
caduta della Serenissima, 14 vols (Rome, 1992–2002), vol. 5 (1996): Il Rinascimento. Società
ed economia, ed. Alberto Tenenti and Ugo Tucci, pp. 913–46. Useful historical background
is to be found in Brünehilde Imhaus, Le minoranze orientali a Venezia 1300–1510 (Rome,
1997).
57 Egle Renata Trincanato, Venezia minore (Venice, 1948).
58 As proposed in Goy, Venetian Vernacular Architecture, pp. 150–71. For detailed studies
of traditional middle-rank housing, see Maretto, La casa veneziana; and Dorigo, Venezia
romanica, 1:334–52.
59 Giorgio Gianighian and Paola Pavanini, Dietro i palazzi: tre secoli di architettura
minore a Venezia 1492–1803 (Venice, 1984); Giorgio Gianighian, “Building Castelforte,” ARQ:
Architectural Research Quarterly 9 (2005), 51–68.