society and the sexes in the venetian republic 365
Numerous non-elites in Venice were immigrants. Especially in times of
plague, famine, and war, men and women came to the city from nearby
mainland towns and villages, Venetian-ruled regions further away (Friuli,
Dalmatia, the Greek islands), Lombardy, across the Alps, and territories
in southeastern Europe under Ottoman control. In their new place of
residence, men with previous occupational experience or at least strong
backs had a reasonably good chance of finding employment. Women,
often single or widowed, had a harder time of it. Those able to enter live-
in domestic service were the more fortunate—though they ran the risk
of seduction or rape by their employers, a not infrequent occurrence.45
Many others, as Inquisition records in particular show, kept body and soul
together by working as sorceresses, healers, and/or prostitutes.46
Male and female immigrants lived all over the city, always (like non-
elite natives) in rented lodgings.47 In contrast, speakers of Greek and Slavic
languages, mostly of the Eastern Orthodox faith, tended to concentrate
in parishes immediately to the east of Piazza San Marco in the sestiere
of Castello. Apparently less able or willing than immigrants from other
regions to learn Italian and integrate into Venetian society, they stuck to
themselves. Native inhabitants, perceiving and fearing them as “others,”
did not hesitate to denounce foreign women to the Holy Office as practi-
tioners and teachers of superstitious healing and sorcery. A case in point
is Marietta Grimani, also known as Marietta greca, tried in 1666. Stressing
that as she was not a Greek but a native Venetian of Cypriot ancestry,
she first claimed that she was not a sorceress but a beautician, then that
she practiced innocuous herbal healing, and finally that she was a vic-
tim of mistaken identity. None of these tactics worked; judged “gravely
suspect as a teacher of heretical spells,” she was sentenced to a year of
house arrest.48 Foreign men, especially northerners, were often accused of
disparaging Catholic doctrine and practice, avoiding Mass and confession,
and eating meat at prohibited times.
Whether populated by natives or immigrants, the small, crowded,
usually one-room dwellings of Venetian workers49 can hardly be consid-
ered private spaces. Through cracks in doors and thin walls, on common
45 Anne Jacobson Schutte, Aspiring Saints: Pretense of Holiness, Inquisition, and Gender
in the Republic of Venice, 1618–1750 (Baltimore, 2001), pp. 101–03.
46 Chojnacka, Working Women of Early Modern Venice, pp. 81–97.
47 Chojnacka, Working Women of Early Modern Venice, pp. 97–100.
48 Schutte, Aspiring Saints, pp. 100–01.
49 Isabella Palumbo-Fossati, “L’interno della casa dell’artigiano e dell’artista nella Vene-
zia del Cinquecento,” Studi veneziani 8 (1984), 109.