Michela Turno
Introduction
Despite the often heated debates at the national and local levels about prosti-tution that have been ongoing since the 1950s, commercial sex has only quite recently begun to receive more attention among Italian historians. This is ap-parent in the lack of studies covering the last four centuries of Florentine pros-titution. While the most relevant publications devoted to this subject focus on the late mediaeval and Renaissance periods,1 none fully addresses the seven-teenth or the eighseven-teenth century,2 and only one study explores the sex trade from the Restoration to 1888.3 All this research is mainly based on documents preserved at the Archivio di Stato in Florence, from the Ufficiali dell’Onestà (Office of Decency 1403–1747) to the Buongoverno (1814–1848), and from the Prefettura del Compartimento Fiorentino (1848–1858 and 1859–1864) to the Prefettura (1865–1952) and Questura (1860–1888).
To date, no studies have investigated male prostitution which, according to Michael Rocke, was a well-known phenomenon in Florence starting in the
1 See Richard Trexler, “La Prostitution florentine au xve siècle: Patronages et clienteles”, An-nales, 1 (1981), pp. 983–1015; Maria Serena Mazzi, “Il mondo della prostituzione nella Firenze tardo medievale”, Ricerche Storiche, 14 (1984), pp. 337–363; Prostitute e lenoni nella Firenze del Quattrocento (Milan, 1991).
2 On the institutions created with the aim of reforming former prostitutes and providing a ref-uge for married prostitutes, see Sherrill Cohen, The Evolution of Women’s Asylums since 1500:
From Refuges for Ex-prostitutes to Shelters for Battered Women (New York [etc.], 1992); John K. Brackett, “The Florentine Onestà and the Control of Prostitution, 1403–1680”, Sixteenth Century Journal, 2 (1993), pp. 273–300.
3 Michela Turno, “Il malo esempio”: Donne scostumate e prostituzione nella Firenze dell’Ottocento (Florence, 2003) and Michela Turno, “Postriboli in Firenze: Un’inchiesta del prefetto del 30 novembre 1849”, Annali di Storia di Firenze, 2 (2007), pp. 233–246. For the period from unifica-tion until 1914, see Mary Gibson, Prostituunifica-tion and the State in Italy, 1860–1915 (Columbus, 1999).
* I would like to thank Franco Nudi and Nicoletta Vernillo of the Archivio Centrale dello Stato in Rome for their help in going through the ministerial files, and I would also like to thank Christian De Vito and Giovanni Focardi for their comments, critiques, and suggestions. Por-tions of this article have been drawn from two contribuPor-tions previously published by the Annali di Storia di Firenze and by the publisher Giunti.
fourteenth century.4 Likewise, no studies concerning twentieth-century pros-titution have been carried out so far.5 Twentieth-century archival documents, such as those preserved at the Archivio Centrale di Stato in Rome, do not seem to have information that could provide good insights into the last century.
The relative paucity of sources is mainly the result of the partial reform of the regulation of prostitution dating back to 1860 and definite abrogation in 1958.
Following the early feminists’ battles against regulation, some measures were introduced in 1888 which limited the state to regulating places of prostitution but not the persons involved. However, it is possible that health and police statistics and, in particular, press reports might offer a very general picture of the trade in the early 1950s when the socialist senator Lina Merlin presented to parliament her draft bill on the abolition of regulation.
The details of prostitutes’ working conditions, family situation, media-tion, and profiles are largely unknown, but could perhaps to some extent be gathered from court records and newspaper articles. Florentine non-profit organizations, such as the c.a.t. social co-operative and Associazione Arco-baleno, provide additional sources of information, as they produced note-worthy documentation between the late 1990s and the first decade of the twenty-first century. These organizations offer medical and legal support to both those who want to leave the business of sold sex and those who decide to keep working as streetwalkers. Given the state of research and the nature and lack of available sources, providing a satisfying overview of prostitution in Florence from the seventeenth century to the present is not an easy task.
However, this chapter will attempt to draw a reasonable, though necessarily in-complete, picture based primarily on what the law has said about prostitution, archival findings, and what is known about the social and economic structure of Florentine society.
The Seventeenth Century: Laws, Definitions, and Social Profiles Until 1680, prostitution in Florence, which was then the capital of the Grand Duchy of Tuscany, was under the administration and control of the Onestà
4 Michael Rocke, Forbidden Friendships: Homosexuality and Male Culture in Renaissance Florence (Oxford, 1996).
5 As far as I know, only two studies have focused on late-twentieth century Florentine prostitu-tion: Laura Lucani, “Criminalità femminile: informazione e ricerca nell’area fiorentina degli anni ‘80” (Unpublished m.a., University of Florence, 1989) and Raffaele Palumbo, La tua città sulla strada: Cronache di ordinarie prostituzioni (San Domenico di Fiesole, 1997).
(hereafter Office of Decency). Created in 1403, this magistracy was to “estab-lish brothels in the city, licence prostitutes and pimps to work in them, regu-late their activities, and adjudicate criminal cases involving the women under [its] supervision.”6 At the same time, it was expected to generate revenue by granting licenses and permission to meretrici (prostitutes) on the basis of a fee and the imposition of pecuniary penalties.7 Over the course of three cen-turies, the magistracy imposed several restrictions on prostitutes’ freedom but also granted some concessions, such as protection from other magistracies, im-munity from prosecution for debt, and the right to bring injustices before the Office. In fact, according to Cohen, “Prostitutes enjoyed more direct access to the courts than did their respectable female contemporaries, who had to rely on male representatives to bring their cause to court.”8 Moreover, the Office of Decency was not infrequently asked to establish whether “loose-living wives and spinsters” or “a woman with only one lover […] were to be counted as pub-lic prostitutes.”9 The decisions of the court varied from one woman to another;
while some were punished, others were exonerated.
By the end of sixteenth century, however, the Office of Decency had already tightened control over both the resources and the movement of prostitutes.
Permission to traverse the city at night or change residences had to be pur-chased from the Office. Any violation was duly fined but “exemptions to most of these regulations were also sold to those able to pay, which was a quicker method to generate revenue than was the collection of fines.”10 Moreover, in line with this trend, registered prostitutes who were married and could general-ly have expected to escape prosecution for adultery saw a deterioration in their position. In 1635 the grand-ducal government allowed the criminal magistracy, the Otto di Guardia e Balia, to charge registered women who were married with adultery if they did not withdraw from their “shameless life” and return to their husbands.11 Adultery was certainly considered to be worse than prostitution as
6 Rocke, Forbidden Friendships, p. 31. According to Cohen, “Early modern Tuscany rec-ognized several variations on the general term meretrice. They spoke of streetwalkers (cantoniere), brothel prostitutes (meretrici in postribulo), parlour whores (donne di par-tito), and courtesans (cortigiane).” Cohen, The Evolution of Women’s Asylums, p. 46.
7 Brackett, “The Florentine Onestà”, pp. 273–300, 281–285.
8 Cohen, The Evolution of Women’s Asylums, p. 44.
9 Ibid., pp. 47–48. Generally, an anonymous denunciation was enough to raise suspicions which would lead to an investigation. See Andrea Zorzi, “The Judicial System in Florence in The Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries”, in Trevor Dean and K.J.P. Lowe (eds), Crime, Society and the Law in Renaissance Italy (Cambridge, 1994), pp. 41–58.
10 Brackett, “The Florentine Onestà”, pp. 273–300, 295–296.
11 Ibid., p. 298; Cohen, The Evolution of Women’s Asylums, p. 49.
it undermined the institution of the family and challenged male prerogatives.
Even so, this and other edicts making it possible for husbands and relatives to denounce married prostitutes had few consequences in practice. Cohen sug-gests that “prostitution might seem to be not a sin but a rational strategy, nec-essary along with marriage, for women to make economic ends meet.”12
Laws attempting to control married prostitutes were as ineffective as those decrees concerning unregistered prostitutes and suspect women. More numer-ous than any other, unregistered prostitutes were perceived to be an additional serious problem but, at the same time, an additional source of revenue. By buying their own immunity, they could avoid wearing the prostitute’s identify-ing sign (a piece of yellow ribbon) and they didn’t have to work in bordellos or reside on those streets designated for prostitution.13 They could enjoy a degree of freedom as long as they behaved with “apparent modesty and decency.”14 They could preserve their reputations and independence and move about free-ly, increasing their opportunities for better business. In fact, “only unregistered prostitutes had property” while “the registered prostitutes were ‘like a snail’
owning so little they could carry it on their backs.”15 Social background, inde-pendence, and the ability to make the most of their entrepreneurial activities could determine (or improve) the living conditions of a prostitute.
According to contemporary observers,16 the number of prostitutes in Flor-ence seems to have increased in the seventeenth century. The great majority were single, but widowed and married women were not infrequently regis-tered with the Office of Decency and they were also among those taken in as repentant prostitutes.17 Reversing the trend of the previous century which was characterized by a predominance of foreign and northern Italian women,18 prostitutes were now mostly of Florentine origin and from Tuscany. Among the 767 meretrici registered with the Office of Decency between 1606 and 1650,
12 Cohen, The Evolution of Women’s Asylums, p. 50.
13 “What was for Florence a new method of controlling prostitution was initiated in 1544 […] with the first creation of official streets of residence for prostitutes”. However, the wealthiest prostitutes “could live where they pleased.” Brackett, “The Florentine Onestà”, pp. 273–300, 291–292.
14 Cohen, The Evolution of Women’s Asylums, p. 51.
15 Ibid., p. 55.
16 Ibid., p. 60; Brackett,“The Florentine Onestà”, pp. 273–300, 296; Giulia Calvi, History of a Plague Year: The Social and the Imaginary in Baroque Florence (Berkeley, 1989), p. 134.
17 Cohen also reports that “very few of these women left evidence of having had children.”
Cohen, The Evolution of Women’s Asylums, p. 57.
18 Trexler, “La Prostitution”, pp. 983–1015, 985–988.
only twenty were not Italian.19 However, according to Brackett, the “1627–50 period saw a drop in all types of enrolments” as a result of the progressive re-strictions imposed on meretrici and, above all, the criminalization of married prostitutes. He suggests that “what probably happened was that many prosti-tutes simply refused to register and went underground.”20 Yet, according to the Census of 1631, 4 per cent of the women whose occupations are known were involved in prostitution.21
The development of textile manufacturing attracted many women from the countryside throughout the sixteenth and seventieth centuries. Brown and Goodman report that “surveys of both the silk and the wool industries com-pleted in 1662–1663 show that female employment [constituted] about 38 per cent of wool workers and 84 per cent of workers in silk.”22 Nevertheless, the majority were employed in the lowest-paid jobs in this industry, thus inducing some of them to seek additional sources of income. Despite social disapproval, the violence to which they were subjected,23 and the taxes and limitations on their freedom imposed by the Office of Decency, selling sex could be seen as a profitable option. Moreover, Calvi notes that “the crisis in manufacturing, in conjunction with the widespread poverty of the popular classes, forced many women, particularly in the textile industry, to become prostitutes.”24
An important aspect of the system created by the Office of Decency was the relationship between the Monastero delle Convertite and the rescue homes such as the Casa delle Malmaritate and Santa Maria Maddalena. Paradoxi-cally, the fines and taxes that prostitutes had to pay to the Office were used to finance the homes for those who gave up the trade.25 Later on, cancellations
19 Brackett, “The Florentine Onestà”, pp. 273–300, 299. More precisely, there were 390 Flo-rentine women, 258 Tuscan women (from Medici territories), 65 north Italians and 34 south Italians.
20 Ibid., pp. 298–299.
21 “Over 80 per cent of women whose occupations are listed were employed in textiles while the remainder were scattered over a number of other occupations such as making cloth-ing (5.9 per cent), prostitution (4 per cent), domestic work (3 per cent), and a variety of activities ranging from making gold thread to selling liquor.” Judith C. Brown and Jordan Goodman, “Women and Industry in Florence”, The Journal of Economic History, 40 (1980), pp. 73–80, 78.
22 Ibid.
23 Cohen, The Evolution of Women’s Asylums, p. 55.
24 Calvi, History of a Plague Year, pp. 133–134. For the economic decline of the wool and silk industry, see the bibliographic reference in Richard A. Goldthwaite, Economy of Renais-sance Florence (Baltimore, 2009), pp. 268, 282–283. See also Furio Diaz, Il Granducato di Toscana (Turin, 1976), in particular pp. 388–408.
25 Brackett, “The Florentine Onestà”, pp. 273–300, 296–298.
and immunities granted to unregistered prostitutes and women of bad repu-tation provided the additional income that the Monastero delle Convertite sorely needed. The widespread practice of granting concessions made it more difficult to identify prostitutes and keep control over them. Nevertheless, the grand-ducal government never ceased to exhort (even by threats) registered, unregistered, and suspect women to reform themselves.
The Eighteenth Century
The lack of available research makes it difficult to offer up a detailed account of prostitutes and prostitution in eighteenth and early nineteenth-century Florence. Nevertheless, some sources and legislation on this matter, as well as an initial superficial exploration of the available sources, allow us to out-line some general considerations. The Office of Decency was absorbed by the city’s chief criminal court in 1680 but, so far as is known, no substantial chang-es were made to the regulatory and fiscal system of prostitution until the late eighteenth century. There is no doubt, however, that Cosimo iii de Medici’s reign (1670–1723) was characterized by bigotry and corruption. His decisions influenced, to a greater or lesser degree, his subjects’ lives, including the lives of prostitutes. In a burst of anti-Semitism, for instance, he enacted several laws against the Tuscan Jewish population. Among them, he banned all “sexual interactions between Jews and non-Jews (which targeted Jewish men who paid for Christian prostitutes).”26
After the short reign of Gian Gastone, the last Medici grand duke, Tuscany came under the control of Pietro Leopoldo of Lorraine, whose policy on pros-titution tended towards repression. Known for having abolished capital pun-ishment and torture in 1786, Pietro Leopoldo’s efforts were also directed to the improvement and protection of public morality. In January 1777 he abolished the tax imposed on meretrici, and in 1780 he banned prostitution from Tus-can territories with the exception of Livorno. A pragmatist, Pietro Leopoldo allowed the toleration of prostitution in this important harbour and centre of trade and business. Leopoldo’s policy regarding prostitution seemed to be efficacious. By this time, Florence was already one of the main destinations of European travellers who made the Grand Tour. According to Rosemary Sweet,
“references to prostitutes or ‘public women’ in Florence were extremely rare:
they formed no part of the discourse around the city, unlike Naples, or Venice,
26 Francesca Trivellato, The Familiarity of Strangers: The Sephardic Diaspora, Livorno, and Cross-Cultural Trade in the Early Modern Period (New Haven, 2009), p. 89.
or even Rome.”27 Archival sources, however, seem to reveal that some form of control over prostitution remained at work in Florence despite the ban. It ap-pears, in fact, that a compulsory monthly health check for all “parlour whores”
(so-called donne di partito) was a practice that had been contemplated but not enacted.28
Control over suspect women and indecent behaviour was the responsi-bility of the four Commissari di quartiere, the post of the community police offices created in Florence in 1777.29 In February of 1780, for instance, they were asked to provide both a list of the “more libertine and scandalous, more loose-tongued, mordacious and chatterbox ecclesiastics and regulars” and a “note of the men and women who are the more libertine and scandalous.”
The latter included a number of married women who, with the more or less explicit consent of their husbands, were having “friendships” with married men.30 Procuring was forbidden and punished. In March of the same year, the commissario of San Giovanni produced a record of those women who acted as procurers (ruffiane). The list was actually very short as it indicated only two female pimps, both of whom were married. According to a police report, one of them was arrested for violating an injunction against admitting anyone into her house, and a parlour whore had been found in company with a married man at her place.31
This and other documents suggest that, in the economy of neighbourhood life, men were generally not involved in procuring and prostitution was often an all-female affair. Moreover, they reveal what was still an unbroken bond between women selling sex and their communities that dates back to the pre-vious centuries. In fact, as already noted, “Despite the state’s attempt to stigma-tize […] prostitution from the sixteenth century on, leading cistigma-tizens still saw
27 Rosemary Sweet, Cities and the Grand Tour: The British in Italy, c. 1690–1820 (Cambridge, 2012), p. 72.
28 Archivio di Stato, Florence [hereafter, asf], Commissario di quartiere (1777–1808), Quartiere di S. Giovanni, 52, 1 August 1780.
29 On the Florentine police, see Carlo Mangio, La polizia toscana: Organizzazione e criteri d’intervento (1765–1808) (Milan, 1988); Alessandra Contini, “La città regolata: Polizia e amministrazione nella Firenze leopoldina (1777–1782)”, in Istituzioni e società in Toscana nell’età moderna: Atti delle giornate di studio dedicate a Giuseppe Pansini, 2 vols, (Rome, 1994), i, pp. 426–508.
30 asf, Commissario, 29 February 1780. Viene richiesta una nota degli ecclesiastici e regolari più libertini e scandalosi, più linguacciuti, mordaci e ciarloni. Nota degli uomini e donne che sono i più libertini e scandalosi.
31 Ibid., March 1780, Nota di quelle donne che si danno per ruffiane. The second woman kept and prostituted a girl in her house.
it as something that has to be tolerated ‘in order to avoid the worst.’”32 Thus, it is no wonder that not only ordinary citizens but also patrician men could be found among the clients of average prostitutes. Anna Tamburini, for instance, the mother of a 5 year-old boy and the wife of a debtor who had taken refuge in Naples, could count on the “friendship” of the noble Francesco Palli, the Count Niccolò Acciaioli, and the Marquis Giuseppe Riccardi.33 Perhaps because of her involvement with nobility, Anna was not immediately sentenced to pun-ishment. On being ordered to join her husband in Naples, she pleaded against the judgement and obtained probation by promising to keep good conduct, which she did.34 But that was not her first time in court.
Anna’s story tells us about the importance of having good relationships, some form of silent support from both families and neighbours, and the abil-ity of some women to slip through the spaces left between the law and its practice.35 Her activities dated back to 1773 when she was 20 years old and her husband was still in Florence. In the following seven years, Anna had a child whom her mother cared for, she started practicing the art of comica, and she continued to maintain her various “friendships”. As far as the documents reveal, she received no sentences; rather, she asked for probation twice, which she judiciously used as a means of loosening the grip of the watchful police.
Continuously scrutinized, suspect married women and married prostitutes
Continuously scrutinized, suspect married women and married prostitutes