Walking in Sixteenth-Century Venice

Mobilizing the Early Modern City

Bibliographic Data

ID12029211
AuthorsFilippo De Vivo (0000-0003-3944-9473, Birkbeck, University of London, corresponding author)
Year2016
Volume19
Issue1
Pages115-141
Publication date2016-03-01
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueI Tatti Studies (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0393-5949 • E-ISSN: 2037-6731
PublisherUniversity of Chicago Press (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.1086/685830
OpenAlexW2399767747
LanguageEN
Citations received4
References cited22

In the course of the sixteenth century, the street view slowly disappeared from textual descriptions of Venice.27 This can be seen most clearly in the evolution of the eulogies by the prolific author Francesco Sansovino.28 The earliest edition of Delle cose notabili che sono in Venetia (1556, but substantially expanded in 1561) takes the form of a spatially located dialogue between a local and a traveler. To illustrate the beauty of St. Mark’s square, the Venetian accompanies his interlocutor across it. “Turn this way,” he invites the visitor, “and you shall see.”29 But the two only leave the square with their imagination (“col ragionamento”).30 The description of the rest of the city follows no clear order, and the narrative’s flow follows the fiction of dialogic exchanges, not the physical continuity of real space. Later, in his encyclopedic Venetia città nobilissima (1581) Sansovino abandoned even the pretence of street walking. Instead, he arranged the description around the six sestieri administrative units, described from east to west, as if looking at them from a boat or, say, from the bell tower of San Giorgio Maggiore. Sansovino eschewed all references to less than exalted aspects of urban space from his summation of the myth of Venice, just as his father Jacopo, one of the chief architects of Venice’s urban renewal in the early sixteenth century, famously helped clear the city’s center of market stalls.31

Aesthetics · Art · Art history · Beauty · Cartography · Dialogic · Geography · Humanities · Literature · Mythology · Narrative · Order (exchange · Visitor pattern · Byzantine Studies and History · Historical and Religious Studies of Rome · History · Renaissance and Early Modern Studies

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