tavernsproject

The final event of the Tavernsproject, a wide-ranging workshop that was held just before the summer break in Bristol, is now posted on this site. It’s an edited version of the proceedings, including brief talks by the project researchers, and the roundtable discussion that followed, with a panel comprising several policy experts as well as Bristol licensing managers and police.

The idea was to see how historical case studies could inform current debates about pubs and drinking, and vice versa.  For my money, it was fascinating to engage with people who are at the front line today of regulating venues, and policing and shaping city centres. What we ended up with was a discussion that touched on – and this hardly covers it – the nature of property, the politics and economics of public, private and civic space, and the social cultures of drinking.

David Rosenthal

This third blog on tavern culture in 16th-century Florence looks at regulation. Previously I suggested that towards the end of the century the tavern became a battleground in the struggle to reshape urban identities. What was required – and the pressure came both from the government and from the mainly clerical agents of Catholic Reform – were sober, sexually continent, doctrinally correct, economically productive Christians. Taverns, on the other hand, apparently produced nothing but lustful, blasphemous, lazy drunks. It’s by no means a new idea that early modern Italy (and indeed Europe) saw plenty of initiatives to reform social behaviour. Nor is there much doubt that taverns played an important role in that drama. Yet I think there’s still something to tease out about the social dynamics of “discipline”. Particularly how it was gendered, how what took place was a bid to reform male culture, to produce good men, good masculinities.

Florence’s most significant ‘anti-taverns’ moment came in 1588. That spring the word in the city was that the new grand duke, Cardinal Ferdinando de’ Medici, wanted his subjects to stop going to the tavern, and that this was why, after a poor harvest,  he had opened up the city’s grain warehouses to the poor at well below the market rate. So in May, in the wake of a preaching campaign over Easter, the big textile-industry confraternities – at least a couple of thousand men – voted almost unanimously to strip their members of “all the offices and honours they love” (their words) if they were caught in the tavern, with expulsion for repeat offences. The confraternity of the cloth dyers, seeking ducal ratification for their new anti-taverns statute, wrote that “they were moved to do this for their own universal benefit, and in order to do something pleasing to Your Most Serene Highness and to honour God and [their patron saint] San Onofrio”. A few days later the confraternities staged pious processions to the Marian shrine at the church of the Santissima Annunziata in order to seal this pact of abstinence – with each other, with God, and with the Grand Duke.

This was the public face of the new anti-taverns contract, and it was incorporated into the government’s general reform of Wool Guild regulations the following year. But could the ban be made to stick? In order to enforce it, the confraternities set up a regime of surveillance whereby police officials or anyone else of “good reputation” could claim a small reward for shopping “transgressors”. In one of the first, and few, surviving denunciations, from September 1588, seven brothers of the city’s main confraternity of silk-weavers claimed to have caught another four, including a serving confraternal captain, drinking in the Trave Torta, a watering hole at the southern foot of the Ponte alla Carraia bridge. However the denunciation system soon began to crumble. Not only was it open to opportunistic abuse, more fundamentally it was unsustainable for elective and participatory bodies whose sacred bedrock was unity and peace. In 1591, the silk-weavers faced that reality and flip-flopped, now prohibiting brothers from testifying against each other. In effect this was an admission that the taverns ban was too divisive, unenforceable, and that support for it had never been as universal as the original votes suggested.

Failure or not, the attempt to outlaw taverns in 1588 tells us a lot about the regulatory currents rippling through urban culture in the late 16th century. For religious reformers, the essential impulse was to harden the boundary between the world of the sacred and the world of the profane. For them, the tavern was in space what Carnival festivity was in time – a prime opportunity for sin. Following the Council of Trent,  Florentine synodal law, backed up by parish visitations, looked to purify confraternal piety by banning meals and “drinking parties” in the oratories of these devotional and charitable societies. At the same time, confraternal statutes, ecclesiastically approved, became more shrill in their prohibitions on tavern-going (even the Tavernkeepers confraternity officially frowned on lock-ins). And in these documents taverns were typically linked to a smorgasbord of wrongdoing that could cost brothers their membership, in particular illicit sex and gambling.

The anxieties of moralists had some basis in reality. Prostitution and sodomy had long been associated with taverns, especially those of the city centre. Indeed in the rich Florentine lexicon of erotic double-entendre, osteria signified the backside, while barfly (taverniere) was another way of saying sodomite. In the hypersexualised Carnival song literature, where double-entendre was everything, two well-known city-centre taverns appear together several times: the Fico (cunt) and the Buco (arse). In one, Alfonso de’ Pazzi’s Song of the Barflies, penned in the late 1540s, the barflies address “the ladies” – the standard format of the genre – to tell them that while they preferred sodomy to straight sex they’d go to the tavern of the Fico since the Buco was closed for non-payment of taxes. As an earlier blog pointed out, the Buco was indeed a well-known venue for sodomy. Gambling, meanwhile, was also intimately associated with taverns. In fact when it came to regulating tavern culture, the government didn’t have a lot to say about drinking, but it repeatedly banned “all kinds of games in any tavern of the city of Florence, either on the little walls outside or on the tables of those taverns”. Punishments for gambling became progressively harsher. In the 1560s you might have to endure the common torture of one or two drops on the rope (strappado) and a modest fine, but by 1585 this was coupled to a three strikes and you’re out policy. Literally out, sent off to the galleys at the grand duke’s pleasure.

Which brings the subject to gender, or rather the combination of class and gender. New imperatives to clean up public morals largely meant cleaning up the morals of the lower classes – with artisans coerced, exhorted and persuaded to become agents of their own redemption. The 1588 anti-taverns pact is a prime example. Almost all the men in the textile industry confraternities were non-citizens or “plebeians”. In the case of the cloth dyers, where the shop owners were sometimes men who belonged to “noble” families and who sat in the brotherhood as “masters”, tavern-going was only prohibited for “labourers”. When these same labourers formed their own sub-confraternity a few years later, in 1595, the dyers’ top official remarked that this “revealed a righteous zeal, in showing that they wanted to do a beneficial thing for their souls and remove themselves from gambling and the tavern”. Ducal legislation against gambling also reveals how the problem was often seen in terms of class. When the well-off (persone da bene) complained about gambling meets in public places, the government reacted by progressively adding to the list of gambling no-go areas. Apart from outlawing gambling in the tavern (considered a kind of quasi-public space where, as anti-gaming laws suggest, the boundary with the street outside was highly permeable), a law of 1566 banned it in any street or piazza, except along the city walls or where there were no houses. In 1579, the government said lower class men had perverted with dishonest and deceitful games the few places where gambling was still tolerated, so it extended the ban to loggias, gardens and shops. By 1585 gambling along the walls was out too, and also along the banks of the Arno.

At the same time, the 1588 campaign points up how the taverns problem was also framed explicitly as a problem of men, of lower-class male sociability. The cloth dyers wrote of how they wanted to promote “the universal peace and quiet of each person, so that they should have more chance of living in a Christian fashion, enjoying the fruits of their labour with their families”. The silk weavers said tavern-going was “damaging the souls of Christians, and destroying their houses, children and families”. If a brother was caught in the tavern and lost his benefits, or was expelled, this punishment specifically excluded the confraternal alms paid to his wife and the dowries for his daughters. A couple of years before the ban, the silk weavers found that officials charged with delivering alms to the “poor of the house” were going off with the recipients and drinking the money in the tavern. The cash was diverted to increase the payment made to members’ wives after childbirth. Again, legislation against gambling talked in similar terms. Artisan and poor men were causing “grave damage” to their wives and families; they should be out earning money, not wasting their time and limited resources with games of chance. In fact I think it’s fair to say that the entire economy of moral reform turned around replacing the sinful expenditure of men for “charity” that protected women and children, substituting male sin for female honour. The cash saved from banning confraternal feasts was overwhelmingly redirected to dowries, to an ideal of female and familial integrity – and indeed there was an explosion of confraternal dowry funds between the 1570s and early 1600s.

So … good Christians, good workers, good men. A rising urban population and the difficult economy of the late 16th century played a role in all of this. Pauperisation and unemployment created fertile terrain for the ideals of the religious reform movement and roughly aligned its agendas with those of the state. And it seems that a decent number of artisan men appropriated as their own the idea that the tavern represented nothing but a social evil, the venue for undesirable aspects of male culture. The bid to put a stop to tavern-going in Florence may have ended in failure, but 1588 was not a good year to head out for a drink after work.

David Rosenthal

It’s hard to get away from certain taverns in early modern Florence – particularly the drinking dens in the crowded city centre. Take Galileo for example. In the comic broadside he wrote in the 1590s against the wearing of the “toga” or academic gown, Galileo picks out just a few taverns to help him nail his main point, that clothes don’t make the man. He argues the exact opposite. He says men are made like flasks. “When you go to the tavern in summer / to the Bertuccie, Porco, Sant’ Andrea / to the Chiassolino or Malvagia”, he writes, you’ll see that the flasks aren’t very fancy but instead reveal the excellent red wine within. What Galileo does, obviously enough, is put a place to an idea – and he namechecks the places that he assumes almost any Florentine would know.

At around the same time, Bastiano de’ Rossi, in a oration he called ‘In Praise of Wine’, takes his readers on an imaginary pub crawl of the entire city – but he ends up in the centre, at the Coroncina, Bertuccie, Panico, and finally the Porco and Fico, two taverns that were more or less across the street from each other on the via Calzaiuoli (see the map below, and my previous blog, The Barfly’s Dream). In a city in which Bastiano finds all the bars are closed, these ones seem to be the very last to shut up shop; and they were, he implies, the places where you tended to end up. Among tavernkeepers themselves, the Porco was considered one of the principal inns of the city. This was where the men elected to visit the sick of the tavernkeepers’ confraternity went every week to consult a list of the brothers who needed to confess and take communion (the surviving statutes are from 1681 but the confraternity was founded in 1542).

So the taverns of the centre – dense with shops and markets, alive with the rhythms of work and commerce, criss-crossed by hundreds of individual journeys every day – had a social, spatial and imaginary character all of their own. They would have been extremely familiar to men from across the city who came in to work or to do business, but also to a wider, overlapping public, for whom they were meeting points for drinking, gambling and socialising. You catch a glimpse of this from documents such as the one produced by a court case in 1433 (admittedly a little early for this project) in which a bunch of men were prosecuted for gambling in the Piazza Sant’ Andrea,  including a cloth merchant from Pisa, a wool cloth manufacturer, an employee of the Forced Loans office and a belt-maker. It turned out that “the cook at the neighbouring tavern” had lent them the dice (Brucker, The Society of Renaissance Florence, 183-4). Mixed in with the drinking and gambling, city-centre taverns were also strongly linked to prostitution and sexual encounters of all kinds. The streets beside the Mercato Vecchio were known for their brothels and, as Guido Ruggiero has pointed out, the taverns in the zone had pretty suggestive names : Bertuccie (Pussy), Chiassolino (Little Whorehouse), Fico (Cunt), Malvagia (Wicked Woman), Porco (Pig/Depraved). In the 15th century, downtown taverns, especially the Buco and Sant’ Andrea, were also regular venues for sodomy. We don’t yet know enough about the sexual landscape of central Florence after the demise of the Republic in 1530, but despite more restrictive zoning for prostitutes (and the effect of creating the ghetto in 1571 on the site of a major civic brothel beside the Mercato Vecchio) and harsher laws against sodomites, it would be very wrong to assume that this sexual culture was wiped out.

With all this in mind, it’s intrinsically interesting to locate the taverns that were such fixtures in the urban mental and social landscape. Just a few examples from the snapshot offered by the 1561 ducal census of shops, a taste from what is work in progress and may evolve into a set of wider spatial reconstructions over the next few months. The Porco (A) – run for 12 years by a certain Giovanni di Chimenti, who paid his rent to three owners (a Medici and two Baldesi) – was on via Calzaiuoli opposite the Loggia of the Nighittosa (in the part of Calzaiuoli then called Corso Adimari). On either side of the tavern were the shops of a crockery maker and a leatherworker. Walk across the street, to the Loggia itself, and you’d hit the Fico (B), or rather you had to go just off the street into an alley called the Chiasso del Fico. The Fico, owned by a widow called Simonetta, was run by a certain Simone di Antonio who had been there for six months. As you headed into the alley, on the corner you would see a leatherworker’s shop, and as you passed the tavern and arrived in the tiny piazza at the end of the Chiasso del Fico you’d find another. Less than a minute away was the Bertuccie (C), also in an alleyway of the same name (now Vicolo del Bazar) off the via del Corso. The neighbours here, on the corners as you entered this narrow street, were the shops of a leatherworker and a barber. I’ve tried to pin these taverns to the famous map produced by Stefano Bonsignori in1584, which is highly detailed though still too impressionistic to be certain about most buildings. If anybody thinks I’m way out, please comment!

There is a lot more to say about the psychology of mapping, then and now. But the key point is this: in these urban spaces individual and collective memory was externalised; they were where one’s sense of identity was in part rooted, and constantly remade in the revisiting. There’s a fascinating story in Le Cene (The Suppers), the mid 16th-century collection by Antonfrancesco Grazzini, which turns around the Bertuccie tavern (C). The story is about a physician called Dr Manente, the victim of a cruel beffa or practical joke orchestrated by Lorenzo de’ Medici. Manente gets so hammered one night at the Bertuccie, his regular haunt, that the oste has him carried out and left in the street. Lorenzo has him kidnapped and has a rumour spread around that he’s died of plague. When Manente is released and returns to Florence a while later, none of his drinking chums recognise him because they are so convinced he’s dead. When he approaches his wife she thinks he’s a ghost and causes a public stir. He runs, he takes refuge in the Bertuccie, where at first not even his “close friend” the tavernkeeper is sure it’s him. Eventually he engineers a gathering of his friends around a table at the tavern. They notice that he drinks two glasses of wine before touching his salad, just as Manente used to do. He won’t eat sweet food, which was also disdained by Manente. Then one of his friends sees that he has a birthmark in the shape of a wild boar –  and suddenly they know him, his re-identification is complete. Many of Grazzini’s stories deal with such extremes of exclusion. It bears thinking about that he chose this well-known Florentine pub (and the minutiae of social drinking and eating that took place within it) as the place in which Manente, who in effect was lost, is finally found, where his social being is rehabilitated.

David Rosenthal

My part in this project, the early modern part, started with an imaginary pub crawl. It’s grand-ducal Florence, 1593, and Bastiano de’ Rossi delivers a speech in “praise of wine” to his literary pals at the Accademia dell Crusca, which had been set up a decade earlier with the aim of standardising Italian. It’s a festive moment, the six-monthly investiture of new officials, and Bastiano, the academy’s secretary, paints himself as a man in desperate need of a drink. He tells his audience how he’d gone to bed one night with an overpowering thirst, then dreamt of finding a tavern in Florence in which he could quench it. (Bastiano de’ Rossi, ‘Cicalata in lode del vino’, in Prose fiorentine, Florence, 1716-45, Part 3a, vol. 2, 1-24)

In his ‘dream’, Bastiano materialises outside the city – but he’s only forty feet from the walls so he knows he’ll find a watering hole nearby. In front of him is the Porta alla Croce, the city’s eastern gate. “I went inside,” he says, “in order to go to Michele del Bello, who has the tavern at the side of the gate. But I found nobody there except a girl who told me that neither master nor servant was around.” So he heads down Borgo la Croce, turns left into via Pentolini (now via dei Macci), then doubles back and heads up into via dei Pilastri to the tavern of the Giardino. But there’s nobody to be found at that osteria either. On Bastiano goes. And he keeps going, until he has taken himself around the entire city and some 30-odd taverns in what turns out to be a fruitless attempt to find a pub that is open and an oste who can serve him. In effect, Bastiano traces out an itinerary of taverns, a drinking tour of the city. It’s the Florence of the barfly flaneur – as opposed, say, to the Florence of the nascent art pilgrim, whom Francesco Bocchi spoke to in his famous guidebook published two years earlier, in 1591.

Bastiano’s dream is interesting because you don’t find many documents that join the dots up so explicitly. What you tend to get, or get quite easily, are administrative sources that give you a static city. I’m using one such source, a detailed census of 1561, to map the roughly 40 taverns in sixteenth-century Florence, which will act as a resource for this project and – when it’s hopefully online/app’d – a useful tool for others. (R Burr Litchfield’s rough guide is in Links). What Bastiano presents us with is an idea of how bodies, mainly male bodies, might move through urban space, how taverns had gravity, pulling people towards them at certain times and along certain routes. He presents us with the idea that Florentines carried with them at least a partial mental map of taverns and their tavernkeepers; and he implies that if taverns were in a sense agents of both an imagined and a practised community within a specific neighbourhood, they could also be places in which men from different parts of the city found themselves gathering, socialising, networking – no doubt especially true for city-centre taverns, such as Sant’Andrea near the Mercato Vecchio or the Fico off the via Calzaiuoli, represented in this image from 1501 (of which more below).

Bastiano’s oration to the Crusca also suggests that taverns, and their tavernkeepers, were as familiar to a social and cultural elite as they were to artisan Florence. We already know that taverns were hubs for artisan men in the same period. A good number of the city’s roughly 40 potenze (powers) – bands of workers who marked out ‘kingdoms’ and ‘ruled’ the city at certain festival moments – were based at taverns. At times the men of a potenza would choose their local tavernkeeper as ‘king’. Furthermore, these men were on familiar terms with tavernkeepers not only within their territories but, like Bastiano, all across the city. Indeed tavernkeepers appear to have been trusted and cultivated characters. A couple of examples. In 1577, one illiterate king in the north of the city (San Barnaba) needed someone to pen a receipt for a cash gift he received from Grand Duke Francesco de’ Medici during festivities for the birth of the duke’s son and heir – so he brought along the tavernkeeper of Sant’ Andrea, in the city centre, to write for him at the ducal treasury. In 1610, the king of the Spalla also brought along a tavernkeeper to write for him, possibly his local publican since the Spalla met at the Trave Torta at the southern foot of the Ponte alla Carraia. The same tavernkeeper, a certain Chimenti Maroni, was also a member of another brigade based at the Porta San Gallo gate, all the way up at the northern tip of the city. In fact Maroni was one of only a handful of men in 1610 (nine out of 259) who show up in a leadership and/or writing role in more than one potenza; another was also a tavernkeeper, an official for two ‘kingdoms’ that shared a common border.

Bastiano de’ Rossi was clearly familiar with his city’s ‘plebeian’ kingdoms, and keenly aware of the carnivalesque comedy of status inversion within which they paraded themselves on the city stage. In his dream he finally fetches up at the Fico, and there he discovers the reason he can’t get a drink in Florence that day: everyone has closed up and gone off for a special meeting of the tavernkeepers’ guild. Why? In order to hear about a catalogue of crimes perpetrated against the trade by none other than the Accademia della Crusca. So Bastiano tags along. He sees the tavernkeepers show up in a sumptuous procession. There’s a king. There’s a hierarchy of senators, the most important of whom, representing the city’s most important taverns, sit closest to the monarch. It’s a micro-state of publicans, a burlesque mirror of ducal government (or the government of the Crusca for that matter). The denunciations begin. The tavernkeeper of the Porco, off via Calzaiuoli, says he was tripped up by a member of the Crusca while delivering food to the table. One bartender says he was given a smack for not serving fast enough. Another was lampooned in song; another was told his boiled eggs were inedible. Bastiano himself is accused of not paying his bar tab. Even the dead, the ghost of a bar boy who once worked the Buco near the Palazzo Vecchio, make an appearance to condemn the members of the Crusca. At the end of it all the king passes a terrible sentence: from now on the Cruscanti will only be served wine from Cinque Terre, or even less palatable plonk if that’s available. Bastiano is so traumatised by this turn of events that he wakes up. Worse, when he runs off to the Fico to tell his friend about his dream, he discovers it’s all true. His oration ends with an appeal to the Counsels of the Crusca to sort it out, to make amends. Otherwise the Cruscanti may be forced into exile in order to get a decent glass of wine.

Bastiano’s portrayal of a ludicrous, vendetta-hungry ‘nobility’ of drink, it’s sacred honour impugned by a series of mundane slights, would no doubt have gone down a hoot among his learned brothers in the academy. Yet at the same time the entire conceit rests on – in fact, it extols – an idea of the social significance of taverns and of the men who ran them. It’s predicated on a quite intimate knowledge of people and places (names and nicknames of both tavernkeepers and Cruscanti are scattered liberally); on the experience of daily transactions, conversations, time spent, that would indeed have included an element of respect and trust – not least to pay up. The general implication of all of this is that, to some extent, the social classes of the 16th-century city shared a vocabulary of tavern-going, that they mixed in the tavern, perhaps played dice or other gambling games there. We don’t know a lot about the dynamics of this, but it does heighten the sense that the tavern could act as a liminal space at a time that saw social stratification become increasingly entrenched (something attested to by the very existence of worker ‘kingdoms’).

These issues – the productiveness of taverns, the kinds of networks, communities and ‘public’ spaces into which they are inserted and which they help to shape – are common to all the participants in this pilot project, from 16th-century Florence to 18th-century London and to Bristol today. One other common theme is the regulation of drinking, and more broadly the conflicts that turned around taverns. I’ll get back to this in a future blog, but want to briefly flag it up in the context of Bastiano de’ Rossi’s oration to the Crusca. For Bastiano, drinking wine was a virtue, not a vice. He’d be mute, he says, if he couldn’t get his hands on a flask of wine, that “precious liquor”, the colour of which gladdens the heart, the taste of which revitalises the body. His celebration of the tavern and of drinking took place at a moment in which the tavern had become a fiercely contested site, a battleground for Catholic reformers. To be sure, the tavern, playground of gamblers and sodomites, had always exercised moralists. The picture above of the Fico, from 1501, is the first in a series of paintings that preached the cautionary tale of a man called Rinaldeschi, who threw horse shit at an image of the Virgin after losing at dice in the tavern, a crime for which he was hanged from windows of the Bargello. As others have pointed out, it was no accident that so much was made of the Rinaldeschi case – this was, after all, a city still in the grip of Savonarola’s millenarian prophecies. But the last decades of the 16th century, post-Council of Trent, witnessed a more concerted bid to draw strict boundaries between the world of the sacred church and that of the profane tavern – “where God does not live” – and to ‘Christianise’ the sinners and wastrels who haunted the latter. Five years before Bastiano’s oration, in 1588, almost every artisan confraternity in Florence had processed against taverns, a state-endorsed collective pact of abstinence that utterly failed to stamp out tavern-going but speaks volumes about the rhetorical and regulatory atmosphere in which Bastiano was writing. Can we see his document as belonging to a wider cultural struggle, as a defence of the tavern at some level, of it’s quasi-mocked regal status, and with that certain kinds of mainly male sociability and behaviour?

David Rosenthal