Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
Red Lights, White Widows & Grey Areas
While Roman clerics furiously scribbled their disapproval, Venetian trends stealthily took
over drawing rooms across the continent, and Grand Canal
palazzi
(palaces) and Veneto
villas lining the Riviera Brenta became playgrounds for Europe's upper crust.
Venetian women's lavish finery, staggering platform shoes up to 50cm high and mascu-
line quiff hairdos scandalised visiting European nobility, until Venice felt obliged to enact
sumptuary laws preventing women from wearing manly hairstyles and blinding displays of
jewels on dipping décolletages. Venetian noblewomen complained to the doge and the
Pope, and the restrictions were soon dropped.
With maritime trade revenues dipping and the value of the Venetian ducat slipping in the
16th century, Venice's fleshpots brought in far too much valuable foreign currency to be
outlawed. Instead, Venice opted for regulation and taxation. Rather than baring all in the
rough-and-ready streets around the Rialto, prostitutes could only display their wares from
the waist up in windows, or sit bare-legged on windowsills. Venice decreed that to distin-
guish themselves from noblewomen who increasingly dressed like them, ladies of the night
should ride in gondolas with red lights. By the end of the 16th century, the town was flush
with some 12,000 registered prostitutes, creating a literal red-light district. Today red
beacons mostly signal construction, but you can enjoy decadent dinners at Antiche Caram-
pane (Old Streetwalkers) near Ponte delle Tette (Tits Bridge).
Beyond red lights ringing the Rialto, 16th- to 18th-century visitors encountered broad
grey areas in Venetian social mores. Far from being shunned by polite society, Venice's
'honest courtesans' became widely admired as poets, musicians and taste makers. As free-
spirited, financially independent Venetian women took lovers and accepted lavish gifts
from admirers in the 16th to 18th centuries, there became a certain fluidity surrounding the
definition of a
cortigiana
(courtesan). With their husbands at sea for months or years,
Venice's 'white widows' took young, handsome
cicisbei
(manservants) to tend their needs.
Not coincidentally, Venetian ladies occasionally fell into religious fervours entailing a
trimester-long seclusion.
During winter masquerades and Carnevale, Venice's nobility regularly escaped the tedi-
um of salons and official duties under masks and cloaks, generating enough gossip to last
until the summer social season in Riviera Brenta villas provided fresh scandal. Some Vene-
tians dropped the mask of propriety altogether, openly cohabitating with lovers year-round
and acknowledging illegitimate heirs in their wills. By the 18th century, less than 40% of
