The ‘Conquest’ and Construction of an Urban Place : The Insula dei Gesuiti in Venice in the Early Modern Period

This article examines the production of place and its socio-economic impact in early modern Venice, reconstructing the urban dynamics in one of the lesser-known peripheries of the city, the insula dei Gesuiti. Building on the idea of place making as a collective enterprise, it concentrates on three stages of urban growth and its pertaining agents: the colonization process undertaken by private citizens and ecclesiastical institutions; their efforts toward a residential urban development; and the state-imposed action to determine the insula’s final outline. These practices were instrumental in securing significant real estate holdings, but they also initiated a profound change in the area’s intended use. Urban transformations engendered a new social identity that would serve as a model for the redesigned Venetian margins.

The cistern-system of early modern Venice: technology, politics and culture in a hydraulic society

At a time when European cities depended on three sources of fresh water for their domestic and industrial needs—rivers, spring-fed aqueducts and groundwater wells—early modern Venice added a fourth possibility: a dense network of cisterns for capturing, filtering and storing rainwater. Venice was not unique in relying on rainwater cisterns; but nowhere in Italy (indeed in Europe) was the approach so systematic and widespread, the city concerned so populous, the technology so sophisticated and the management so carefully regulated as in the lagoon city. To explore Venice’s cistern-system, a range of primary sources (medical treatises, travellers’ accounts, archival records) and the contributions of architectural, medical and social historians, and archaeologists are analysed. The article examines the system’s functioning and management, including the role of the city’s acquaroli or watermen; the maintenance of freshwater quality throughout the city, in the context of broader sanitation measures; and the place of the “wells” and fresh water in daily life in Venice. As a means of teasing out the myriad links between nature, technology and society in early modern Italy, the article concludes with a brief comparison of the politics of water supply management in the very different urban realities of (republican) Venice, (viceregal) Naples and (papal) Rome.

Thomas Henshaw's strange séance in Venice, circa 1648: A coda to Robert Boyle by himself and his friends

This article presents a hitherto unpublished account of a magical séance conducted by the virtuoso Thomas Henshaw (1618–1700), later Fellow of the Royal Society, while travelling in Venice ca 1648. The episode had previously been known through an account of it given by Robert Boyle, but in Boyle's version its protagonist was unclear. It is now for the first time revealed as Henshaw on the basis of a further record of it among the papers of John Sharp, Archbishop of York (1645?–1714). The discrepancies between the ‘new’ version of the story and that given by Boyle are here elucidated and the opportunity is taken to outline the background to the séance in terms of the history of magic in early modern Venice. In addition, broader comments are included on the implications of the episode for attitudes towards alchemy and magic in the period.

Sheltering refugees: ephemeral architecture and mass migration in early modern Venice

This article investigates the creation of a shelter for migrants in fifteenth-century Venice. As an ephemeral structure, the shelter raises questions regarding the scope, mutability and materiality of the city's early modern urban fabric. Further, due to its mission to shelter eastern refugees, the shelter is embedded in foreign policy matters stemming from and aiming to stabilize Venetian presence in the eastern Mediterranean. This article positions the structure in the context of an early modern refugee crisis and Venice's multi-pronged urban and architectural responses in poor relief.

Leakage, Contagion, and Containment in Early Modern Venice

Two well-known architectural types of enclosure in early modern Venice – the Jewish Ghetto and the plague hospitals or lazaretti – are examined within the spatial dynamics of quarantine and the larger geographic sphere of the Mediterranean. Architectural and urbanistic mechanisms for maintaining purity against influences the Christian Venetians understood as harmful, the ghetto and the lazaretto worked to visually recognize, bureaucratically identify, and physically seclude ‘dangerous’ individuals. Both were also porous: the ghetto was open to all during daytime hours, when Jews were also allowed to exit into the city, and the lazaretto’s population grew and shrank as new people sickened and patients recovered or died. This ‘leakage’ broke through any ideal of containment, and could be productive, benign or malign.