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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 30 October 2009
This article presents the tale of a serial flirt, punished for making a noisy, lewd nuisance of himself outside a widows' residence in Florence in 1553. Close study of this vivid episode uncovers some of the sonic strategies of ritual insult and abuse available to early modern city-dwellers, and is also an opportunity to explore the connections between aurality and spatiality in late Renaissance Florence.
1 This article takes its cues from historians such as Natalie Zemon Davis, Thomas V. Cohen and Jonathan Walker who deliberately use literary devices and step outside of academic prose conventions in order to make serious historiographical arguments. Cohen, T.V., Love and Death in Renaissance Italy (Chicago and London, 2004)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Davis, N. Zemon, Women on the Margins: Three Seventeenth-Century Lives (Cambridge, MA, and London, 1995)Google Scholar; Walker, J., ‘I spy with my little eye: interpreting seventeenth-century Venetian spy reports’, Urban History, 29 (2002), 197–222CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Accordingly, I have adopted a direct, almost conversational style of address, which is intended to emphasize the role of story-telling in the writing of history. The opening sentence, for instance, is an injunction to consider the past as both foreign and familiar, and to reflect on the role of the historian's imagination in negotiating this distance. The first section, about ‘tuning in’ to the soundscape, also draws on the ideas of Smith, B.R., The Acoustic World of Early Modern England. Attending to the O-Factor (Chicago and London, 1999)Google Scholar; Schafer, R.M., The Tuning of the World (New York, 1977)Google Scholar; and Truax, B., Acoustic Communication (Westport, 2001)Google Scholar.
2 A key-note in music ‘is the note that identifies the key or tonality of a particular composition. It is the anchor or fundamental tone and although the material may modulate around it, often obscuring its importance, it is in reference to this point that everything else takes on it special meaning. . .keynote sounds become listening habits in spite of themselves’, from Schafer, Tuning of the World, 9.
3 The church and asylum of Orbatello are described in G. Richa, Notizie istoriche delle chiese fiorentine divise ne’ suoi quartieri (Florence, 1754-62), vol. I, 292–9.
4 R. Trexler, ‘A widow's asylum of the Renaissance: the Orbatello of Florence’, in R. Trexler, The Women of Renaissance Florence. Power and Dependence in Renaissance Florence, 3 vols. (Binghampton and New York, 1993), vol. II, 75. More generally this work includes a more comprehensive demographic profile and institutional history of the Orbatello, 66–94.
5 Landucci mentions the finestre impannate (panelled windows) with reference to lights shining through them. Landucci, L., Diario fiorentino dal 1450 al 1516, ed. del Badia, I., trans. De Rosen Jervis, A. (London, 1927), 132Google Scholar.
6 Tomas, N., The Medici Women: Gender and Power in Renaissance Florence (Burlington, 2003)Google Scholar; Strocchia, S.T., ‘Gender and the rites of honour in Italian Renaissance cities’, in Brown, J.C. and Davis, R.C. (eds.), Gender and Society in Renaissance Italy (London, 1998), 39–60Google Scholar.
7 These are Archivio di Stato di Firenze (ASF), Capitani di Parte Guelfa (CPG), numeri neri (nn.) 701, no. 135r–v and no. 136r–v. There is also a fleeting mention of this case in the Libro di partiti of the capitani at CPG, nn. 11, no. 44v.
8 For studies of charivaris, scampanate and other similar insults see: Cohen, E., ‘Honor and gender in the streets of early modern Rome’, Journal of Interdisciplinary History, 22 (1992), 597–625CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Corrain, C. and Zampini, P. (eds.), Documenti etnografici e folkloristici nei sinodi diocesani italiani (Bologna, 1976), 28, 98, 100Google Scholar; N. Zemon Davis ‘The reasons of misrule: youth groups and charivaris in sixteenth-century France’, Past and Present, 50 (Feb. 1971), 41–75, J. Le Goff and J.C. Schmitt (eds.), Le charivari, actes de la table ronde organisée à Paris, 25–27 avril 1977, par l'École des hautes études en sciences sociales et le Centre national de la recherche scientifique (Paris and New York, 1981), 261–82; C. Klapisch-Zuber, ‘The mattinata in medieval Italy’, in Klapisch-Zuber, C., Women, Family, and Ritual in Renaissance Italy, trans. Cochrane, L. (Chicago, 1985), 261–82Google Scholar; G.C. Pola Falletti-Villafalletto, Associazioni giovanili e feste antiche. Loro origini (Milan, 1939), 449–80; Strocchia, ‘Gender and the rites of honour’, 52–7; E.P. Thompson, ‘Rough music reconsidered’, Folklore, 103, 1 (1992), 3–26; R. Trexler, ‘The youth are coming! Nonsense in Florence during the Republic and Grand Duchy’, in Trexler, R., Dependence in Context in Renaissance Florence (Birmingham, 1994), 338–41Google Scholar.
9 Fanelli, G., Le città nella storia d'Italia. Firenze (Rome and Bari, 1993), 262Google Scholar; Passerini, L., Storia degli stabilimenti di beneficenza e di istruzione elementare gratuita nella città di Firenze (Florence, 1853), 639–48Google Scholar.
10 Anna Cerchiai and Colleta Quiriconi have briefly outlined the development of the Offices of the Parte from its factional origins in the thirteenth-century Guelf-Ghibelline conflict, its intial institutional role in adjudicating the confiscation of property (whence its officers derived significant political influence and financial clout) and its development as it gradually absorbed the functions of various offices of state, to form the large bureaucratic structure that it had taken on by the sixteenth century. A. Cerchiai and C. Quiriconi, ‘Relazioni e rapporti all'ufficio dei capitani di Parte Guelfa – parte I, principato di Francesco I dei Medici’, in G. Spini (ed.), Architettura e politica da Cosimo I a Ferdinando I (Florence, 1976), 185–258.
11 After 1549 – in addition to its original function of managing the confiscated goods of ghibellines and rebels – the Guelf magistracy had also absorbed the role of the Office of the Towers and was responsible for the supervision of rivers and bridges within the Florentine dominion. Thus, by the 1550s the Parte Guelfa was not only occupied with overseeing the Orbatello, but also heavily involved in the regulation of public space (such as roads, public real estate, river banks, water and windmills, towers, city walls and fortifications) as well as the imposition of various minor taxes and levies and the supervision of mercantile weights and measures. P. D'Angiolini and C. Pavone (eds.), Guida generale degli Archivi di stato italiani, 2 vols. (Rome, 1983), vol. II, 73.
12 An inability to pay rent and the need to protect their daughters are the two most common reasons given in the suppliche. See for example CPG, nn. 700, no. 24r and no. 141r. Trexler also argues that this protection of the girls’ pudica honestas, with the ultimate aim of marriage, was a primary concern of the Parte (if not also the widows themselves) with regards to the Orbatello. Trexler, ‘Widow's asylum’, passim.
13 The priest's duties and conditions are laid out in CPG, nn. 702, no. 305r–v, when Andrea Mancinelli is chosen to succeed Antonio da Vertine as priest after the death of the latter in 1554.
14 See for example CPG, nn. 700, no. 146r, where the priest reports that ‘I have diligently taken information from many people and find Mona Betta, Florentine and widow of Girolamo, Sienese, to have always lived and to [continue to] live honestly as a good woman (‘jo ho diligetemente presa informatione da piu Psone et truovo Ma betta fiorentina gia donna di Girolamo sanese essere sempre vissuta & vivere honestamente come Donna da bene’) as he recommends a place for Mona Betta. For an example of a negative report see CPG, nn. 702, no. 180r.
15 Trexler, ‘Widow's asylum’, 69.
16 In 1553, for instance, they sent in the bargello, having found that despite the edict against males entering the Orbatello many such males were going there, and staying there at their pleasure – ‘tal edicto s'è pubto et appichato alla porta di decto Orbatello et perche fu referto al magto che lo edicto non era observato ma che molti viandavano et stavono ad lor bene placito tale edicto non obstanze, et pero Il magto ordino al bargello che vi andassi’. CPG, nn. 701, no. 196r.
17 See for instance the scandals at: CPG, nn. 700, no. 323r–v; CPG, nn. 701, no. 135r–v, no. 136r–v, no. 164r–v and no. 196r; CPG, nn. 702, no. 44 bis and no. 204r. There is even an odd accusation in 1575 against the priest of the Orbatello, for the playing of a game called the ‘gioco del maschio e femmina’ (game of the male and female). CPG, nn. 735, no. 30r.
18 ‘il nome di Orbatello in bordello’. CPG, nn. 701, 164v.
19 The scandal in January of 1553/54 is in CPG, nn. 702, no. 204r, and CPG, nn. 11, no. 53v–54r. The list of young men is at CPG, nn. 702, no. 44 bis. The verb scorbacchiare (to insult or humiliate) is derived from corbacchio, a perjorative term for a large crow or raven. It is interesting to note the persistent links in this story between birds, bird calls and the rituals of both scorning and flirting. See nn. 32 and 48.
20 CPG, nn. 702, no. 44 bis.
21 The venerable old ladies at the gate are cited by Trexler, ‘Widow's asylum’, 92 n. 88.
22 After the Prologue to Cecchi's 1549 play, L'Assiuolo (The Horned Owl), which ends: ‘But look, here they come. Listen to them.’ G.M. Cecchi, The Horned Owl (L'Assiuolo), trans. and ed. K. Eisenbichler (Waterloo, Ontario, 1981), 4. By allowing academic prose to converge with contemporary dramatic conventions, this article draws attention to the epistemological position of the historian as story-teller; it emphasizes the power of narratives and literary genres to mould the ways in which historical subjects like Piero account for their behaviour, just as an historian's attempt to make sense of the past is likewise shaped by an imperative to render a coherent form. See also n. 54.
23 CPG, nn. 11, no. 10v (26 Apr. 1553). This edict was published by herald, affixed to the gate of Orbatello and renewed several times in 1552–54. In 1584, when the captains ordered a renewal of the prohibition against men entering the clausura of the Orbatello, there is also mention of a penalty of 10 scudi. CPG, nn. 751, no. 70.
24 ‘vi c'é sto una volta o dua la settimana’. CPG, nn. 701, no. 136r.
25 The usual amount given to fanciulle who had lived in the Orbatello for at least five years was 50 scudi. CPG, nn. 698, no. 36r, and CPG, nn. 716, no. 174r. Further information on Parte sponsored dowries in Trexler, ‘Widow's asylum’, 80 and passim.
26 ‘quasi che ella si vergognassi addirlo’. CPG, nn. 701, no. 136r.
27 ‘se ella é povera e Jo son povero no faremo bene Jnsieme’. CPG, nn. 701, no. 136r.
28 Brucker, G., Giovanni and Lusanna. Love and Marriage in Renaissance Florence (Berkeley, 1986), 93Google Scholar.
29 ‘a ogni modo come giovane v'è andato et facto qualche poche di baie’. CPG, nn. 701, no. 135r.
30 Brucker, Giovanni and Lusanna, 77–8.
31 Ibid.; D. Weinstein, The Captain's Concubine: Love, Honour and Violence in Renaissance Tuscany (Baltimore and London, 2000). In addition to the common element of the lingering suitor, both of these two stories involved a ritual attack upon the house of one of the protagonists.
32 Bolzoni, L., The Web of Images. Vernacular Preaching from its Origins to St Bernadino da Siena (Ashgate, 2004), 165Google Scholar. I am grateful to Kate Blake for bringing this poem to my attention. This is but one of several symbolic associations within this story between the sound of bird calls and the rituals of both flirting and scorning. See also nn. 19 and 48.
33 There were a number of convents and monasteries in the immediate vicinity of the Orbatello: one in via degli Agnoli (now via Alfani) another in via del Rosaio (now via della Colonna) and four of them in Borgo Pinti. The complaint against children's noise is published in F. Sacchetti, Opere, ed. A. Chiari (Bari, 1938), vol. I, 111, and cited in R. Trexler, Public Life in Renaissance Florence (Ithaca, 1980), 368. Cloth drying workshops (tiratoi) of the Wool Guild gave their names to the present-day via della Colonna and via della Pergola.
34 G. Cambi, ‘Istorie di Giovanni Cambi, cittadino fiorentino’, in I. da San Luigi (ed.), Delizie degli eruditi Toscani, 24 vols. (Florence, 1770–89), vol. XXII, 240, cited in Trexler, Public Life, 289.
35 Some of the historical customs and superstitions surrounding bells have been catalogued by Cleto Corrain and Pierluigi Zampini in their collection of ethnographic and folkloristic documents that appear in Italian church law and other ecclesiastical records, Corrain and Zampini (eds.), Documenti etnografici, 6–7 and 28. For a more detailed treatment of the historical meanings of bell sounds and soundscapes, see the path-breaking Corbin, A., Village Bells: Sound and Meaning in the Ninetenth-Century French Countryside (New York, 1998)Google Scholar. Corbin there explores the links between social space and aurality; reminding us that in France, like Florence, the ‘bell tower prescribed an auditory space that corresponded to a particular notion of territoriality, one obsessed with mutual acquaintance’, 95.
36 Peter Bailey defines noise by echoing Mary Douglas’ social definition of dirt as ‘matter out of place’, and thus calls noise ‘sound out of place’. P. Bailey, ‘Breaking the sound barrier’, in M.M. Smith (ed.), Hearing History: A Reader (Athens, OH, 2004), 23.
37 Smith, Acoustic World, 58.
38 Welch, E., Art and Authority in Renaissance Milan (New Haven, 1995), 39Google Scholar. For bishops investigating blasphemers in the locality see Burke, P., The Historical Anthropology of Early Modern Italy: Essays in Perception and Communication (Cambridge and New York, 1987), 101Google Scholar. See also T. Kuehn, ‘Fama as a legal status in Renaissance Florence’, in T.S. Fenster and D. Lord Smail (eds.), Fama: The Politics of Talk and Reputation in Medieval Europe (Ithaca, 2003).
39 For instance, the priest refers to ‘tutto che ho udito dire’ (all that I heard said) when reporting to the Captains in CPG, nn. 700, no. 296 bis. For further speculation about Mona Pasqua, see also n. 56.
40 L. Ikins Stern, ‘Public fame in the fifteenth century’, American Journal of Legal History, 44, 2 (Apr., 2000), 198–222. Chris Wickham notes some of the gendered qualities of gossip as pubblica fama for medieval Tuscany in Wickham, C., ‘Gossip and resistance among the medieval peasantry’, Past and Present, 160, 1 (1998), 3–24CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See also the discussion of the specific localities (marketplace, barbershop, pharmacy, public square etc.) of information exchange in early modern Venice in de Vivo, F., ‘City’, in de Vivo, Information and Communication in Venice: Rethinking Early Modern Politics (Oxford and New York, 1997), 89–119Google Scholar.
41 Alberti, L.B., Libri della Famiglia, trans. Watkins, R.N. (Columbia, 1969), 178Google Scholar.
42 Contemporary chroniclers and diarists certainly commonly equated the communal spaces of neighbourhood with mouths – as in ‘the mouths of the piazza’ which is of course also the title given by A. Molho and F. Sznura to their edition of an anonymous Florentine diary, Alle bocche della piazza: diario di Anonimo Fiorentino (Florence, 1986). See their introduction for a pertinent analysis of the sounds of the city of Florence as they are described by the diarist, 34–8.
43 ‘ella venne et gridavagli et diceva che vuoi far costi se elbargello ti citrovassi tenemenerebbe’. CPG, nn. 701, no. 136v.
44 The aspirated ‘h’ sound is still a characteristic of the Tuscan accent as it is spoken today, and can also be inferred by spellings throughout these documents and others in the archival record.
45 In the Intronati's Prigioni (1531), I, ii, Godenzio weeps: ‘uh, uh, uh, uh’ and in II, v, Alamanno weeps in a similar fashion. I am very grateful to Professor Nerida Newbigin for bringing these instances to my attention.
46 See for example the anonymous Carnival song ‘Canzona del Gufo’ in C. Singleton, Canti carnascialeschi del rinascimento (Bari, 1936), 36–7.
47 ‘sta nella corte in chiusa a contraffare l'assiuolo a più potere; che m'ha fatto quasi smascellar delle risa, sentendolo così gentilemente cantare in Assiuolo’. G.M. Cecchi, L'Assiuolo, ed. L. Fiacchi (Milan, 1863), IV:vi, 122. Cecchi was well known for his sensitivity to the idiosyncracies of the Florentine vernacular; his plays were full of local idioms and references. In the prologue to L'Assiuolo, Cecchi claims that he has taken the story from an incident occurring in nearby Pisa and not the usual classical sources. While Cecchi's play was very well known at the time, it is hardly likely that Piero was making a specific reference to L'Assiuolo. It is very probable, however, that the playwright, with his interest in philology and local linguistic customs, was drawing on an existing Florentine sensibility which associated the imitation of an owl with a scenario of seduction and cuckoldry.
48 As in ‘Alor fa il gallo cucuricù,/ l'asaiuol chiù chiù,/ il cucul cu cu.’ F. Sacchetti, Il libro delle rime, ed. F. Brambilla Ageno (Florence and Melbourne, 1990), 56. See nn. 19 and 32.
49 See CPG, nn. 722, no. 18, which mentions an ordinance governing the Old Market that prohibited wool-workers from being seated around the column of the said market, so they could not make ‘insolencies’ or molest the poor women who sold fruit and vegetables around the column. Four wool workers were found to have contravened this rule, having been seated at the column and having made baie, they were sent to the chief of police to make an example to others ‘because they were very insolent’.
50 The scribe (probably Bernardo Melanesi) writes the word ‘baie’ several times to describe Piero's behaviour, calling it ‘in everyway typical of a young man’. In addition to Piero's case, see ASF, Otto di Guardia e Balia del Principato (Otto DP), 2234, no. 39r–v (a cuckold's serenade that included baie and other ‘ugly things’ done to a house, see n. 70) or Otto DP, 2240, no. 36 bis r which refers to ‘di certe baie di giovani solite’. For a literary reference to baie as mocking banter, see B. Cellini, La vita (Parma, 1996), ed. L. Bellotto, libro I, capitolo 89. Also in Cellini's autobiography is an insulting grunt transcribed as ‘Ou, Ou’. Cellini, La vita, libro I, capitolo 21.
51 Several clerical strictures in late sixteenth-century Tuscan synod documents against the ‘consuetudine degli strepiti nei mattutini delle tenebre’ have been found by Corrain and Zampini, who also cite one of the stories of Piovano Arlotto as evidence of an ‘ancient right of youth’ to gain access to and make uproar in the churches around Easter-time. Corrain and Zampini (eds.), Documenti etnografici, 98. The particular nexus of youth culture, noise and disorder is explored in Zemon Davis ‘The reasons of misrule’, and Trexler, ‘The youth are coming!’ See also n. 8 for a more general bibliography.
52 Mark M. Smith rightly asks us: ‘Why should the sounds represented in print constitute “indirect” evidence? Writers in early modern England ably used print to convey aurality. . .while actual sounds could not be reproduced with true fidelity until the invention of electromagnectic recording devices, print itself provided a form of recording.’ M.M. Smith, ‘Coda’ in Smith (ed.), Hearing History, 395, my emphasis.
53 ‘quando fu insulla porta fece hu hu hu hu et poi senando insul canto. et quelle fanciulle vennono allaporta, et esso se ne torno versola porta dorbatello. et quelle fanciulle se ne furon drento et esso spassegio dua o tre volte di giu insu li fuora’. CPG, nn. 701, no. 136v.
54 Indeed the many convergences between this real-life tale and the hallmarks of contemporary literature patently support Thomas V. Cohen and Elizabeth Cohen's argument that early modern court documents present the historian not with an event, ‘but the story of an event, which must have followed the contours of the narratives of the day. But the moment itself may too have had its aesthetic cast, for lifelike art and artful life assuredly fed off one another; that is, people shaped their deeds under the influence of the tales they had heard.’ T.V. Cohen and E.S. Cohen, Words and Deeds in Renaissance Rome: Trials before the Papal Magistrates (Toronto, 1993), 11.
55 Burke, Historical Anthropology of Early Modern Italy, 97. See also 99, 101, 104, 108 for information regarding libels and noisy insults.
56 ‘la nocte qualche una volta v'e passato cantando per la via et dicendo la gobba e la quaresima mettendola in canzona et dicendo questa vechia grinza et nera’. CPG, nn. 701, no. 136v. Quaresima (Lent) was commonly symbolized by an old hag (just as Carnival was depicted as a plump jolly man). The gobba, or hunchback woman, that Piero here and elsewhere mentions could well be one of the actual widows, several of whom are described as crippled. For instance, Sor. Barbera is described as storpiata, and in 1552 lived in house no. 20 with Mona Elisabetta and Mona Pasqua. Indeed, it is possible that this Mona Pasqua could be the same widow that Piero referred to as Cecia's neighbour (see n. 39). Mona Margherita, in no. 19, was also described as storpiata. ASF, Miscellanea Medicea, 223, fol. 160v, and CPG, nn. 700, nos. 140r and 265r.
57 For instance, one such personalized insult that Piero sung – ‘Ecco la pera, che ita per la gobba’ – fits quite neatly into the well-known folk melody Ben venga maggio. I am very grateful to Professor Nerida Newbigin for this suggestion.
58 The full text of Queste vecchie grinze e nere is ‘Ballata contro le vecchie invidiose’, in Marchetti, I. (ed.), Rime inedite o rare (Florence, 1955)Google Scholar.
59 Patrizia Bettella, The Ugly Woman: Transgressive Aesthetic Models in Italian Poetry from the Middle Ages to the Baroque (Toronto, 2005), 65ff.
60 Indeed, widowhood had an ambiguous status in early modern Florence, with women able in some cases to exploit far greater personal autonomy as widows than they could otherwise as wives or daughters. However, as Allison M. Levy has pointed out, the figure of the widow was the subject of no small cultural anxiety on this very account. A. Levy, ‘Early modern mourning’ (Bryn Mawr College Ph.D. dissertation, 2000).
61 Trexler, ‘Widow's asylum’, 68. By the early seventeenth century, the Orbatello increasingly came under the direct patronage of the duchess, who began to receive supplications addressed specifically to her. In 1617 she commissioned a report on the condition and number of rooms there (CPG, nn. 787, no. 62r and 62 bis).
62 For a typical example of such an incident, with ‘playing, singing, yelling, whistling, and stone throwing’, see Weinstein, The Captain's Concubine, 90. For Florence, see a serenata di corna in Apr. 1559 in ASF, Otto DP, 2234, no. 39r–v and no. 53r. I am very grateful to David Rosenthal for alerting me to this ‘cuckold's serenade’. See n. 70.
63 As in Brucker, Giovanni and Lusanna, 28 and 85, when cornia bestiarum were supposedly nailed over the door of the house of Lusanna's husband, who had also been publicly called a becco (cuckold) in front of the entire neighbourhood. See also n. 70.
64 Thereby offering another example of what Natalie Zemon Davis calls ‘the social creativity of the so-called inarticulate’. Zemon Davis, ‘The reasons of misrule’, 74.
65 Cohen, ‘Honor and gender’, 602.
66 Ibid., 605.
67 Ibid., 621.
68 Horodowich, E., ‘The gossiping tongue: oral networks, public life and political culture in early modern Venice’, Renaissance Studies, 19, 1 (2005), 22–45CrossRefGoogle Scholar; see also Cohen, ‘Honor and gender’, 621: ‘In the rhetoric of honor, females, ideally were creatures of “inside”; for them all males, except family, belonged “outside”. Only at the edges of the house, through its openings, did men and women supposedly meet. Even though contact was, in reality, not so limited, the doors and windows of early modern Rome were exciting places, emotionally and sexually charged. Chatting at doorways and gates was often a prelude to a love affair, prostitutes openly displayed themselves at their windows.’
69 Trevor Dean is cautious about the extent to which these house scornings are evidence for a transcendent or timeless Mediterranean code of honour and gender, but makes use of some of Cohen's approach to interpret relatively similar incidents found in the criminal records of late medieval Dean, Bologna. T., ‘Gender and insult in an Italian city: Bologna in the later middle ages’, Social History, 29 (2004), 217–31CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
70 In Florence, one Domenico di Alexandro di Domenico, a cloth-weaver, was accused of being part of a band of young men who had made a scornful racket and done ugly things – having performed a ‘serenata di corna’ (cuckold's serenade) and ‘di pinta la facciata di cose dishoneste’ (painted the façade with dishonourable things) – at a house in Ardiglione where the shopkeeper Giambatista di Domenico lived, in March of 1558/59. (‘Domenico di Alexandro di Domenico tessitore di drappi humil servitore di Vostra Eccellènza a quella expone qualmente quattro mesi fa i'compagnia di certi altri giovani ritrovandosi in ardiglione fu messo Querela che havevono fatto certe baie et brutture à una casa Al Magistrato degli Otto de quali tre stettono in prigione & diffesonsi et furono absoluti et lui ritrovandosi fuora ne havendo modo di potere spendere per far’ le difese non comparse per il che fu costumacia confinato per dua anni alla galea.’) ASF, Otto DP, 2234, no. 39r.
71 ‘v'è andato et facto qualche poche di baie ma senza alcuna dishonestà come più latamente nell'alighato constituto si contiene’. CPG, nn. 701, no. 135r. Unfortunately, I have not been able to find this further allegation.
72 ‘non maj ha usata una parola dishonesta ne alc° atto dishonesto ne con brachetta ne con ochi ne alr'menti ma sempre honestamente come un giovane honsta che vagheggia una fanciulla’. CPG, nn. 701, no. 136v.
73 ‘Et perché e’ non ci è tal riscontro che si possa trovar altro pare al magistrato sopra il suo confesso fin qui castigharlo in questa forma cioé fargli dare un tracto insino in dua di fune ma leggiermente in publico li fuor del palazzo et mandare e sua pannj drento alla porta d'orbatello et farlo accompagnare fino quivj ad riverstirsi et pensono che questa sia una buona medicina che gl’ e altri se n'habbino astenere.’ CPG, nn. 701, no. 135r. A tracto di fune involved tying the prisoner's arms behind the back and then dangling the prisoner from a window or platform, which easily resulted in the dislocation of the shoulders. Compare this punishment to that given to two youths who entered the Orbatello in CPG, nn. 700, no. 323r–v.
74 Corbin, Village Bells.
75 ‘In a sense, the sound wave arriving at the ear is the analogue of the current state of the physical environment, because as the wave travels, it is changed by each interaction with the environment. Whereas vision allows us to scan an environment for specific detail, hearing gives us a less detailed, but more comprehensive, image of the entire environment in all directions at once.’ Truax, Acoustic Communication, 17.
76 Smith, Acoustic World, 15–22.
