Saundra Weddle, "The Brothel and Beyond: An Urban History of the Sex Trade in Early Modern Venice" (Penn State UP, 2026)

Summary

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Podcast Summary

Episode Overview

Podcast: New Books Network
Host: Yana Byers
Guest: Sandra Weddle, Professor of Architecture at Drury University
Book Discussed: The Brothel and Beyond: An Urban History of the Sex Trade in Early Modern Venice (Penn State UP, 2026)
Date: January 28, 2026

This episode spotlights Sandra Weddle’s groundbreaking urban history of the sex trade in early modern Venice, which investigates how sex work was intertwined with the city’s physical, social, and economic fabric. Through archival research, innovative mapping, and analysis of under-explored sources, Weddle uncovers both the agency of sex workers and the broad networks that sustained—even profited from—the trade. The discussion also considers how architectural and urban approaches reshape the study of marginalized populations in city history.

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Main Discussion Points and Insights

1. Genesis and Methodology of the Book

• Weddle’s Motivation & Academic Roots
  • Her interest developed from studying the interplay between human activity and the built environment, initially through convent architecture, later expanding to segregated urban groups like Jews, foreign merchants, and ultimately sex workers ([04:38]).
  • Collaboration on the "Technologies of Segregation" grant prompted her to cast a broad net, noticing under-examined archival material on sex workers in Venice ([04:38], [07:53]).
  • She saw a gap: most work only focused on high-status courtesans, neglecting street-based prostitutes, and lacked analysis connecting sex work to urban space ([04:38]).

“No one had really mined the sources to address the relationship between the sex trade and place. And that’s really what I set out to do.”
— Sandra Weddle, [07:09]

2. Why Venice?

• Venice’s unique position as a crossroads of trade, migration, and conflict made it a dynamic and diverse environment—ideal for studying the itinerant and visible nature of its sex trade ([08:29]).
• Its exceptional preservation allows for spatial and architectural analysis, and the city’s archives are among the richest in Italy ([08:29], [11:51]).

“I think it’s very easy to imagine the life that filled the streets in that period.”
— Sandra Weddle, [10:38]

3. Sources, Challenges, and Innovative Methodology

• Source Constraints:
  • Scarcity of first-person accounts from sex workers; sources become richer only in later periods.
  • Relied on legislation, tax and parish records, notarial documents, and especially tax censuses and maps ([12:59]).
• Mapping as Method:
  • Utilized digital tools and historic maps (e.g., Jacopo di Barbari's Bird's Eye View) to reconstruct spatial dynamics.
  • Mapping layers reveal patterns otherwise invisible in Venice’s labyrinthine plan ([16:53]).

“It really helps to see it in two dimensions and to layer this information. That’s when things are revealed that you otherwise wouldn’t see.”
— Sandra Weddle, [17:22]

4. New Approach to Urban/Spatial History

• The book centers not on monumental Venice, but on vernacular spaces—neighborhoods, bridges, markets—turning attention to marginalized populations ([16:53]).
• Mapping is hailed as both a method of analysis and a tool for public historical understanding ([16:53], [19:38]).

5. The Sex Trade: Structure, Hierarchy, and Agency

• Varieties of Sex Work:
  • Hierarchical: from high-status courtesans with patrons to street-based workers, with procuresses and housekeepers playing roles ([20:33]).
  • Sparse evidence on daily practices, except for occasional misogynistic satires, but evidence of informal training and network-building ([20:33]).
• Women's Agency:
  • Weddle insists on recognizing non-elite women’s forms of agency—shown in their mobility and network-making—even if not wielding traditional power ([24:06]).

“These women exercised their agency and cultivated networks with other sex workers, with other workers around the city. They were inserted into their neighborhoods.”
— Sandra Weddle, [48:30]

6. Geographies of the Sex Trade in Venice

• Rialto: The Institutional Center
  • Site of the municipal brothel from the 14th to mid-16th century, but not purpose-built.
  • Patrician families legislated and profited from sex work ([25:36]).
• Beyond Rialto: Multicentric Urban Pattern
  • Many women avoided the institutional brothel and worked in surrounding parishes, especially San Cassian/Karampane, a warren of dense tall buildings ([28:05], [30:18]).
  • Sex trade also flourished in the orbit of San Marco—center of power and spectacle—but with different rhythms due to proximity to government and festivals ([32:56]).
  • Cannaregio became increasingly important, especially in later periods; its broad, straight canals fostered different spatial practices ([36:32]).
  • Gondoliers and other transport workers played key roles as intermediaries in the trade ([36:32], [38:20]).
• Segregation and Integration
  • Contrasts the relative freedom of sex workers with the strict isolation of Jews in the Ghetto, highlighting different mechanisms (and failures) of urban segregation ([39:27]).

“It's this interesting juxtaposition of these women who are very mobile, and this spatial control of the city's Jewish population.”
— Sandra Weddle, [41:07]

7. Control, Reform, and the Urban Experience

• Religious and Social Institutions:
  • Convertite (convent for reformed sex workers), Zitelle (shelter for 'vulnerable' women), and Soccorso (small, flexible house for those seeking exit from sex work) were founded, often requiring seclusion and forfeited mobility ([41:38]).
  • Architecture of these institutions reflected their moral intentions—church facades and convent-like features, signaling their segregative purpose ([46:46]).

“The kind of morality of the institution is the billboard… it’s sort of the first face, the first architectural face.”
— Sandra Weddle, [47:36]

• Cycle of Segregation:
  • Similar logics at play in brothels, refuges, and even quarantine islands—each aiming to contain and 'cleanse' dangerous elements ([46:55]).

8. Major Takeaways and Broader Impacts

• Sex work permeated Venetian society: partnerships, kin, patricians, trade guilds, boatmen, landlords all intersected with sex workers’ lives ([48:30]).
• The sex trade was not peripheral—it was woven into “everyday life,” revealing alternative valences in the city’s urban fabric ([48:30]).
• The book’s methods and findings offer a model for similar studies in other cities (though more challenging where the urban landscape has dramatically changed) ([19:50]).

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On the Everyday Nature of Sex Work:

  “Everyday life, which could be violent, but that was a part of everyday life too.”
  — Sandra Weddle, [19:22]

• On Changing our View of Venice:

  “I am really hoping that this book allows people to see another Venice.”
  — Sandra Weddle, [19:38]

• On the Materials and Methods Used:

  “A surprisingly important source are the Venetian tax censuses... And these describe building fabric. They tell me how much people paid in rent and sometimes describes their occupation.”
  — Sandra Weddle, [13:37]

• On the Social Networks of Sex Work:

  “...redefines the sex trade. Obviously it’s centered on the body of the sex worker, but it includes patricians, it includes gondoliers, innkeepers, bathhouse keepers, fry shop workers, lodging house keepers...”
  — Sandra Weddle, [48:30]

• Host’s Reflection:

  “Your work allows us to see what it might have been like when everything was just going fine.”
  — Yana Byers, [19:13]

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Timestamps for Key Segments

• [04:38] — Weddle explains the genesis of her focus on sex work and urban space in Venice
• [08:29] — Why Venice? Discussion of the city’s unique attributes and archival strengths
• [12:59] — Discussion of sources, their limitations, and the role of new mapping methodologies
• [16:53] — Value and novelty of mapping in historical methodology
• [20:33] — Hierarchies and varieties within the sex trade; limits of what sources reveal about women’s lives
• [24:06] — The issue of women’s agency and network-building in sex work
• [25:36] — The Rialto brothel: its founding and eventual dissolution
• [30:18] — Karampane/San Cassian as a secondary historic hub of sex work with rich sources
• [32:56] — San Marco’s unique dynamics as a political and festival center affecting the sex trade
• [36:32] — Cannaregio’s rise and spatial peculiarities in the sex trade network
• [39:27] — The founding of the Jewish Ghetto and contrasting segregation of Jews and sex workers
• [41:38] — Discussion of reforming institutions: Convertite, Zitelle, and Soccorso
• [46:46] — The architectural language and function of enclosures for 'reform'
• [48:30] — Final takeaways: networks, agency, and broader redefinition of the sex trade’s role in Venice
• [49:43] — Weddle’s next projects: essays on Venetian social infrastructure, bread ovens, and city mapping

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Author’s Next Projects

• Short-term:
  • Contributing essays to a book on Venetian Luoghi comuni (“Commonplaces”), with threads linking back to the sex trade research—gondoliers, bathhouses, post-fire Rialto, and communal bread ovens ([49:43]).
• Long-term:
  • New book on the lost network of neighborhood bread ovens in Venice, examining their role in daily life and social infrastructure ([49:43]).

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Overall Tone

Insightful and collegial, blending deeply-researched academic discussion with engaging anecdotes and genuine enthusiasm for the subject. Weddle is especially transparent about research challenges and the value of interdisciplinary collaboration, with host Byers providing context, warmth, and thoughtful questioning throughout.

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Transcript

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[Marshall Po]

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[Yana Byers]

Hello, everyone, and welcome back to New Books in Early Modern History. I'm Yana Byers, your host, and I'm here today with Sandra Weddle, professor of architecture at Drury University, to talk about her new book, the Brothel and An Urban History of the Sex Trade in Early Modern Venice. Out this year with Penn State 2026 with Penn State University Press. Hello, Sandra.

[Sandra Weddle]

Hi. Thanks for having me. Yana.

[Yana Byers]

Thank you for coming. Welcome to the program. It is so nice to talk to you and you. Excellent. How are you on this chilly January day?

[Sandra Weddle]

Yeah, it's a cold day. Most of the US Is socked in with lots of snow and cold temperatures. I think it's minus four here today, so staying warm.

[Yana Byers]

Yeah, that's nuts. It's. Let's be clear, the she's not in like, you know, like Michigan. It's in Missouri. It shouldn't be this cold. Yeah.

[Sandra Weddle]

South Central US So it's unusual for here.

[Yana Byers]

Yeah. So the book just out, right?

[Sandra Weddle]

It's available, like, the last week.

[Yana Byers]

Yeah. So that's exciting.

[Sandra Weddle]

Really exciting to see it out after something like eight years of work.

[Yana Byers]

Yeah. You know, all of our academic. All of the academic academics in, like, the humanities are going to get this. But I don't think that the average person who understands that this is a decade of your life. Right.

[Sandra Weddle]

Like, it's a big commitment. Lots of time. The research time, the writing time, the mapping time, the editing time, all of it. It's a long, long process. I think the initial. I think I submitted the initial manuscript to Penn State in 2023. So it's, you know, it's a process, but it really takes that long for the ideas to percolate and also for the refinements that happen in the editing process. So I don't regret that time at all. But it is a big. It's an era.

[Yana Byers]

Yeah, it is. I mean, because you really. You can think about it all you want, but it. When you start actually writing, that's when you're working through your argument and you think you know what you're going to say and then will change and it.

[Sandra Weddle]

Goes in another direction.

[Yana Byers]

Yeah. Ideas you haven't thought about or something that you realize, like, man, this just doesn't work. Then, damn it, it just doesn't work. I'm gonna rethink this. You know, I always say this too. The other thing is you have to actually physically type the words. So annoying. So annoying. That amount of time. Yeah. All right, so let's get into it. So what led you to write this book?

[Sandra Weddle]

So my. My interests, my research interests have always focused on. On the ways in which human activity and relationships inform the built environment, and then in turn, how the built environment shapes human activities and relationships. So an aspect of that has been my focus on the experiences of women during the early modern period. And so for my dissertation and many years after that, I focused on convent culture and convent architecture, first in Florence, then in Venice. In 2017, I had a visiting professor position at Washington University in St. Louis in the College of Architecture. And while I was there, I collaborated with Daniel Bornstein, a historian of early modern, late medieval Italy. We collaborated on a Mellon grant that looked at segregation in the early modern city. And that project was called Technologies of Segregation. The technologies in this case were, of course, the built environment, but also, I would say, political and social mechanisms that segregated various groups of people. So for that, I Was really. I cast a very broad net. And I started surveying things that were very obvious in Venice. The Jews in the ghetto, the foreign merchants at the Fondiki convents. It was an extension sort of of my convent work. And then, importantly for my current book, Sex Workers at the Municipal Brothel. So with that Mellon grant and. And also Adelmas grant, I spent a good part of a summer taking archival soundings. And what I discovered was that there was a lot of material in the archive on sex workers. Although it was very fragmented, it was dispersed across several different archival fonts. My surveys of secondary sources also turned up a lot of material. But I found that a lot of it was repetitive and unsourced. And it tended to reproduce certain tropes, especially focusing on courtesans. And it completely neglected, almost completely neglected, the experiences of the majority of women who were active in the heterosexual sex trade, who solicited on the streets. So in looking at all of this material, I really thought that I could, because of my background in architectural history, that I could engage the topic in a way others hadn't done before. No one had really mined the sources to address the relationship between the sex trade and place. And that's really what I set out to do.

[Yana Byers]

Right on. Okay. So it's this kind of story. You have this idea. You run into an archival source that kind of changes your mind. You have collaboration, and then you've got kind of a. You know, and then you've got this. A methodological issue that we're going to talk about in a bit. So it's, you know, it's a really nice kind of organic development of this book. So before. Before. Any more about the book in particular. Why are you in Venice? Why do this in Venice?

[Sandra Weddle]

Well, it's true there were sex workers all over Italy. Venice is such a particular context, you know, it's this crossroads between north and south, east and West. You have a political and economic context where people are coming and going constantly. The cultural context is diverse and complex and therefore very interesting. As the center of an extended territory. It meant that also a lot of women were coming to the capital from all over the Venetian territory. So there was this flux of people who were. Who would come to Venice, for example, because they were encountering famine or they were encountering war or just poverty, and they would come to the city to make their way. So I think a lot of those conditions. One could do a similar study of the sex trade in other Italian cities, for sure. But I do find Venice to be extremely stimulating just because of the diversity and the dynamics of the city, which are constantly changing. And then as an architectural historian, the built environment and the natural environment are so peculiar and fascinating. And so I was really interested. I talk about this in the book, Introduction to the Book. I'm really interested in architectural vernaculars. And Venice is interesting because we tend to think of it as a place that has changed relatively little. It has changed in meaningful ways, and we can talk about that, too. So the fact that you can be in Venice and because of how little the city has changed relatively little, it's. I think it's very easy to imagine the life that filled the streets in that period.

[Yana Byers]

Yeah. There is a feeling in Venice that's just not quite like what you get anywhere else. No, no. Yeah. I mean, it's an international city with a lot of trade there. It's always at war. People are coming and going. It's a very itinerant city. It's famous then, you know, so there's this whole body. There are people who travel there. Some of the earliest travel literature.

[Sandra Weddle]

And the city, I would say, became famous, infamous for the sex trade. Very early on, people were coming to the city to engage in that because the city was so famous for it. So, you know, maybe first among equals in Italy in that regard.

[Yana Byers]

Yeah, for sure. Yeah. And the other thing that I. That we should responsibly talk about is there are really, really good archives.

[Sandra Weddle]

Yes, really good archives. It's so interesting to do this work in Venice, really, any kind of archival work anywhere. You become really aware of what archivists, especially the late 18th, early 19th centuries, thought would be important, you know, and so things that, you know, were documented sometime somewhere, don't survive, or they survive for a really limited time. You know, they cover a very limited time span. So there are amazing archives, but never all the ones that you would desire.

[Yana Byers]

No. And even. And fabulous sources. And they. They don't ask the questions you want to know.

[Sandra Weddle]

Right, right.

[Yana Byers]

How are you talking to this woman and not asking this very important question? Right, yeah. And it's well preserved, and our study there is well funded. So it's. It's a good city to work in. It's also just kind of awesome. But speaking of sources, tell me what you're using for this.

[Sandra Weddle]

So, as I said, it's a really wide range of sources. One of the biggest challenges, or maybe the biggest frustration of this project is the scarcity of sources that capture the firsthand experiences of sex workers. These start to appear more frequently at the end of the 16th century. They're more readily available for later periods and. And have been documented by historians like Joanne Ferraro. They're going to be coming out in forthcoming work by Celeste McNamara, Alessandra Cellotti. There are a number of people who are working on this topic, but for a later period, and they have amazing sources. And so it will be really interesting to see how their work makes a kind of pendant to this book. So instead, a lot of my source material comes in the form of legislation or other documents that government magistracies use to record sex crime or street crime, rather. So what that means is that sex workers often appear in these documents only when they're perceived to be breaching existing social and legal norms. So that's something to kind of acknowledge right away. But I've also consulted other kinds of documents. So notarial documents, parish censuses, baptismal records that tell me a little bit about how sex workers were inserted into the religious life of their parish, which isn't something that people generally think of. A surprisingly important source are the Venetian tax censuses that tell me a lot about landlords who rented to sex workers and their procuresses. And these describe building fabric. They tell me how much people paid in rent and sometimes describes their occupation. And so those kinds of documents have helped me reconstruct the social context and give an idea of the local building stock. So those are the main sources for the text, but they're also the maps that I think are a really important apparatus for the book. And so the maps in this book plot locations where sex workers were concentrated, where they lived, where they worked, but also businesses and institutions that had a local presence where these women were. So making those maps was a challenge. And I can talk about the method of actually doing the mapping itself, but to understand the built environment in the 16th century, it meant that I had to work backward from contemporary maps today, looking all the way back, even using the Bird's Eye View by Jacopo di Barbari, the massive woodcut, extremely detailed source that helped me understand the built environment. So that work also, I was looking at maps, I was looking at drawings, plans of various sorts to understand the urban fabric.

[Yana Byers]

Is this a new methodology? This like looking at the built environment?

[Sandra Weddle]

Maybe, I would say maybe. I'm always reluctant to say something like this is the first. No, I think what has been really helpful is to be able to work with digital tools that allow you to layer information and to toggle information on and off and to just visually analyze what is happening on the ground in a way that you cannot, especially in Venice, where it's so labyrinthine. You cannot achieve that kind of analysis when you are on the ground. So it really helps to see it in two dimensions and to layer this information. And that's when things are revealed that you otherwise wouldn't see. So the urban history part of it, obviously I'm looking at the history of these women across the city, but the other part of the urban history of this book is that it's a vernacular. It's a vernacular urban history. It's not the urban history of Piazza San Marco. It's not the urban history of major institutions. And I think it could be a viable method, a really useful method for others going forward. So I don't know if it's a whole new method, but I hope that it will inspire, you know, I definitely hope that it will inspire others to think spatially and to think about mapping as a tool. It's a tool not only for study, but also, obviously for communicating ideas to the reader.

[Yana Byers]

I will tell you that this work. I mean, this book. But the article that you see bits of in this book and then our conversations over coffee and ice cream as well, kind of have really allowed me to visualize the city in a new and interesting way and to. And to think about particularly something like, you know, the quotidian. Something is. Quotidian is every day as sex. Work is this kind of thing that is a constant. And it. And because of the problems with the sources. Right. Where you just. You find out about it in these ruptures when something's gone horribly wrong. But your work allows us to see what it might have been like when everything was just going fine.

[Sandra Weddle]

Everyday life. Everyday life, which could be violent, but that was a part of everyday life too.

[Yana Byers]

Yeah, Yeah. I guess going fine. It's not necessarily fine, but yeah, when. When it is go. When it is just everyday life. Nothing particularly remarkable.

[Sandra Weddle]

It's gratifying to hear that from someone who really knows the city very well. I am really hoping that this book allows people to see another Venice.

[Yana Byers]

I think it really does. And I think it also. I think it can serve as a model for these kind of studies. Other places, it's harder to get at. In other places, I think, you know, in a place like London, where everything's been leveled repeatedly.

[Sandra Weddle]

Right. Burned to the ground and.

[Yana Byers]

Yeah, yeah. Over in Germany, who even knows, you know? But it's. It's a really good tool if you wanted to get at this. All right, so let's talk about what you. What you discovered. Here and a little kind of. Let's fill in our audience. What's. What are the varieties of sex and trade that make up the early modern Venetian sex trade?

[Sandra Weddle]

Right. Well, one thing I want to say from the start is I'm really focusing on the heterosexual sex trade. And so that's a kind of, that puts a kind of framework on what we're talking about here. And because I'm talking about women sex workers, when we're talking about the sex trade, there is definitely this hierarchy of women who operate within the sex trade. At the very top of that hierarchy, we have courtesans who may have had one or more exclusive clients, who may have supported them by paying for their lodging and paying for their clothing and, and so on. And those are the women who are most frequently documented in the secondary sources. And then at the bottom of this hierarchy are women who solicited on the streets. Um, and either they were negotiating with clients themselves or they had procuresses or procurers who were their go betweens. In actual fact, we don't know a lot about their sexual practices. So when we talk about their activities, their, you know, the, the work that they're actually doing, we know very little, except for what has been recorded in largely misogynistic satires, some of which have been discussed by Courtney Quaintance in her wonderful work. So in terms of the activity itself, the nature of their activities, we know fairly little. So that's sort of the range of women and roles. When we talk about a trade, we tend to think about a situation where someone is an apprentice and they're brought up through the ranks and they are sort of legitimized within their occupation. Obviously this is a much looser kind of context. However, we do know that there were women who kept houses where they would. They were said to have trained girls and young women to participate in the trade. And so we don't really know the nature of that so called training, but it was said to have happened. So in that sense, I think probably within the network of sex workers, there must have been a kind of word of mouth where things that worked, things that didn't work, you know, all manner of information was exchanged, but we don't really have evidence of that.

[Yana Byers]

Yeah, back to these issues with sources of like not being able to hear very often the voices of these women. Yeah. And then another thing, when we're talking about kind of the range of sex work, and I want to ask who's.

[Sandra Weddle]

Involved with the sex trade, but that's.

[Yana Byers]

Such a huge Question. And I think first we need to talk about kind of the study of women in history and what our historiography is.

[Sandra Weddle]

Yeah. So a big preoccupation of mine was to try to consider this issue of women's agency and how that was expressed. So I'm really looking at women's mobility and their network formation as evidence of the fact that these women did have agency. In the introduction, I cite the terrific work by Marie Kelleher, in which she really tries to expand our understanding of women's agency in the pre modern period. And she points out, rightly so, I think that there has been a lot of the history of women that argues for agency and power, focuses on elite women, and suggests that only those women who had contact with the levers of power and institutions and so on could exercise their agency. And so that issue of historiography and how we situate these women and their agency was really important to me. And the question of mobility and these network formations and sort of insertions into local neighborhood dynamics fit really well with my focus on place.

[Yana Byers]

All right, our story starts at the Rialto. And as appropriately so, it all begins at the Rialto. So tell me what's going on here?

[Sandra Weddle]

So in the 14th century, the Venetian Republic decided to, or attempted to segregate the sex trade in Rialto. And they established a municipal brothel. And the idea was that all the sex workers in the city would live there, they would all work there. And in fact, one of the things that my work has uncovered is that the Bravo was not a purpose built building. It was sort of inserted in an existing building where multiple units in this building were owned by patricians. And I think it's interesting you were talking about how we define the scope of the sex trade. Who is involved in the sex trade? A really important part of this book, I think, is. Is my revelation that the same people who are legislating and trying to control the sex trade are profiting from it. So we have the. In Rialto, we have the brothel owners, but. And we can talk about this, you know, how the trade spilled out into other neighborhoods. So many patrician men families were profiting from the sex trade in various ways. So the brothel was founded in 1360. It was replaced by a second brothel in 1460. And then by the mid 16th century, it ceases to be mentioned. And this is another discovery of this work, that the family that owned the second brothel, the Malipiero family, basically their line died out. They didn't really have a family member to continue the work or the management, let's say, of the brothel. And for decades, like for 50 years, they had been complaining that they were not making the profit that they expected to make. So the brothel in Rialto basically declined, and as far as we know, as far as I can tell, closed in the mid 16th century.

[Yana Byers]

So in the realta, we have this. I mean, of course, here we have this brothel, and is that the center of the sex trade?

[Sandra Weddle]

So it was the sort of institutional center of the sex trade. But this is a key aspect of my study of these women's agency, because many, many women rejected that institutionalized context and moved to other neighborhoods. So obviously, neighborhoods right around Rialto where they were not working and living in this institutional context, but they could benefit from. From the flow of potential clients in Rialto. So the parishes just around Rialto were major hubs. And then it extended really to neighborhoods throughout the city. So it was the official hub. But then there were these sort of secondary hubs throughout the city. One thing that we find in this period is that in the legislation especially, people will say, sex workers are everywhere. You can't go anywhere in the city without encountering a sex worker. And they were dispersed throughout the city, but it's not strictly true. They really did gravitate to particular nodes. And so that really anchors the book. The book is organized geographically so that people can get a sense of kind of neighborhood dynamics. And so, yes, Rialto, at least from 1360 to about 1550 or so, was the institutional center of the sex trade. But in fact, it was a multicentered situation.

[Yana Byers]

So when we're moving out of the Rialto, I'd like. Let' swe can talk about any number of neighborhoods, but I'd like to talk about one of my favorite places in the city, one of my old neighborhoods and where I tend to stay. San Gazian. I love San Gazian. It's not too far from the Rialto. So tell me about what's happening here. What does the San Kasian tell us about the city broadly in Sexpeare?

[Sandra Weddle]

So for those who don't know, San Kassian is a parish that is just adjacent to Rialto. And it had been a center of the sex trade, really, since the 14th century. And it became famous for this neighborhood where there was a high concentration of sex workers. And the neighborhood came to be called the Karampane. So after the neighborhood was named after a residence that had been owned by the Rampani family. And it was this rabbit Warren of streets and really dense, very tall buildings. And so it became a kind of secondary focus of the sex trade very, very early on, just across the canal from Rialto. And it's a. It's a place where I have had the good fortune to have great sources, including the parish censuses, that allow me to really understand what the household makeup was, how many sex workers were living.

[Yana Byers]

There.

[Sandra Weddle]

And who their neighbors were, and allowed me to analyze the kind of pedestrian networks, the boat circulation networks and so on. And so Karampane, even today? Today, I would say that Karampane. Many people come to Venice and they know about the history of the sex trade. They have no idea that there was this municipal brothel in Rialto. But chances are really good that if they're looking for tourism information, they're going to know about the Carampane also partly because of the Ponte delle Tete. So, you know, this bridge of the breasts where it was said, although I haven't found evidence of it, you know, the sex workers would show their breasts at the windows and recruit clients or, you know, call to clients from there. So Sankasian was a very important, and remained really into the 18th century, an important node for the sex trade.

[Yana Byers]

All right, so let's move over to San Marco, which is a completely different situation in every conceivable way, right? It is, what, half an hour's walk?

[Sandra Weddle]

Yeah, something like that. Yeah. Yeah. So San Marco is so different because it was the political center of the city, dominated by, you know, the major institution, the Palazzo Ducale, the Basilica of San Marco. When we talk about San Marco, we have to really think about it in a before and after situation, because in the 16th century, the Piazza was, you know, kind of redefined, and the buildings around it were redefined, and the architecture was classicized and so on. But before that time, the edges of the Piazzetta, especially the little square in front of the Palazzo Ducale, it was bordered by inns, and there were a lot of sex workers in these inns on the square, in the perimeter around the square. And then in the 16th century, a lot of those inns were relocated off of the square into adjacent neighborhoods. So when that happened, I think the sex trade certainly existed in those bordering neighborhoods before the 16th century, before the big reorganization of the piazza. But we have a lot of sources for the 16th century that tell us a lot more about what's happening. I refer to it as San Marco and its orbit, because there's almost like this kind of, like, constellation of spaces around the perimeter of San Marco, where sex workers are collaborating or they're living in or adjacent to a bathhouse. You know, the bath houses around there are really important. They're connected to the lodging houses because a lot of people were coming, staying in lodging houses because they had business to do in the piazza, in the offices of the government. So, yeah, San Marco is a completely different context in comparison, for example, to San Castian, which is really dense. And the spaces, obviously the piazza itself, Piazza San Marco itself is really wide open. And those neighborhoods around it, I think we can think of them as sort of serving. Serving, you know, those government offices and so on. So they have a completely different context, as you said.

[Yana Byers]

Yeah, different context, different field, different population, different needs, probably different working hours, you know, different.

[Sandra Weddle]

Yeah, exactly, exactly. And seasonal also, because we think of events like the sense affair that would happen in May and there would be this huge influx of merchants and artisans and, you know, buyers who would come and that would take place in the Piazza San Marco. The lodging houses got full in May, you know, inns got full in May because of that seasonal cycle. And so that's a part of it also. You wanted to be close to the piazza, just for convenience sake.

[Yana Byers]

And now I'll jump completely over the city to the Canaregio, kind of the. I think probably when people come to Venice, I think it's very possible that for tourists to never go to Cannaregio, Right. To not even know it exists, maybe save getting off the train.

[Sandra Weddle]

It's true. And in this period, especially the 16th century, Cannaregio is really in the process of becoming, I mean, a lot of it, that part of the city, the northwest part of the city, has been dominated by industry. But it starts to get filled in and it becomes a really active place of the sex trade. Getting back to sources, one of the things that I. A question that I have is whether in the 16th century, especially the late 16th century, it's the case that Cannareggio becomes the new center of the sex trade. Some of the sources would suggest that that's the case because there is a preponderance of information about sex workers in Cannareggio. But I think we have to consider the possibility that it may skew our interpretation of it just because of the nature of the sources. But there is amazing. There are amazingly rich resources for Carnarejo to kind of understand where women were, what sorts of activities they were engaged in, and how they fit with kind of local dynamics. So especially gondoliers who were transporting people to the mainland, they would often land In Cannaregio. And gondoliers are really important. We were saying about the large scope of the sex trade. Gondoliers were definitely part of it, you know. So, yeah, Canareggio is. Is a really fascinating subset of this story.

[Yana Byers]

Yeah, I mean, it.

[Sandra Weddle]

It's.

[Yana Byers]

It's the Nor. It's this rim of the city and it's very far away. And it's. It's got very far away from. I don't know what I'm saying. From what, San Marco? From everything. But it has, like, big body, like very. The canals are really wide and very long.

[Sandra Weddle]

Very long.

[Yana Byers]

Feels like a very different part of the city feels exposed in this way.

[Sandra Weddle]

It's a really nice way to put it, actually. And the fact that there are these long, straight canals. When we're thinking about the practices of women and how they're displaying themselves or how they're engaging with other people from bridges, from the caves, the fondamente, along the canals. The spatial practices are completely different just because of the way that part of the city was developed. So it's gridded in a way. And you almost never see a grid anywhere in Venice. And so, yeah, the spatial experience there is completely different.

[Yana Byers]

Yeah. And also the Canaregio is home to another kind of very Venetian centric, very special thing, the first ghetto. So. Yeah. Which is. Tell us about the ghetto.

[Sandra Weddle]

So in the early 16th century, the city of Venice devised the ghetto for the segregation of Jews. And they were located initially, they were located on an island that the ghetto later expanded in two different waves and two different directions. But this idea, this kind of gets back to that first practice, the project that I was initially working on, technologies of segregation. This idea that in Venice, islands are literally isolating, they are segregating, and the island becomes this device for controlling the movements of these people. So it is interesting that Jews are segregated. Interesting probably isn't the right word. But they're segregated on this island initially on this single island in Canareggio. And at the same time, the women, the sex workers who are there have rejected segregation and they're circulating freely all over the sestierre. So, yeah, it's this interesting juxtaposition of these women who are very mobile, and this spatial control of the city's Jewish population.

[Yana Byers]

Yeah, and the idea that you can be so segregated and kind of this. There can be a contagion, like a contagion that can be contained on these isolae, you know, is. Is a works kind of. It's a nice thought experiment there, you know, so in your epilogue, you talk about some of the homes that the city's upper classes established to manage the sex trade. Let's get into those.

[Sandra Weddle]

So the ones that most people will have heard of. Let's begin, I guess, with the Convertite, which is a convent that was established in Giudeca. So across the wide Giudeca canal from the center of the city, really physically separated from the heart of the city, the city center. It was a place where sex workers could leave the trade and live for the rest of their lives. They would have to pay a monastic dowry. They would have to profess monastic vows, which meant that they were never to leave. They were actively enclosed. And so that was an important institution founded in the 16th century to obviously contain the sex trade and quote, unquote, rehabilitate the women who joined that community. Another institution that I talk about is the Zitelle, which was a different kind of institution. It wasn't a monastic institution, but it was a sort of shelter or hostel for women who were considered to be vulnerable to recruitment into the sex trade. And so these women lived at the Zitelle, also on Giudecca, until such time that a marriage match could be contracted for them or they could go into some kind of household service. Not a monastic institution, though. They didn't have to profess monastic vows. The focus of the epilogue is an institution called the Socorso. And the Socorso is located kind of near Campo San Barnaba. For people who know Venice, it's in the Dorso d' Oro Sestiere. And the Socorso is interesting because it, too was intended as a sort of refuge for sex workers who wanted to leave the trade. Much smaller than the other two institutions that I just mentioned. Much, much smaller. Not a monastic institution. A place where a woman could come and stay for a limited amount of time, limited period of time, with the hope that she would either enter into a marriage match or enter into domestic service or some other kind of occupation outside the sex trade. One of the interesting tropes about the Sikorso, and it's repeated over and over again, is that the famous writer, courtesan Veronica Franco, was like the foundress of this institution, which seems not to have been the case, but it's still a really. It's a very interesting institution. And I have to say this was one of the archives that was hardest for me to access. It's in an archive that used to be known as the Ire I r e. Now it's the epav. And there are really informative Documents there about how that institution worked and who was coming and going and just the life of the institution. So that institution, I thought, was a really important way to end the book, because it was a. It's an institution where women could voluntarily go, but it was also an institution where in order to profit from the services, the women had to give up their mobility, they had to give up their agency. They were enclosed, essentially, enclosed in this place, even though they were not professed nuns. So the Socorso and other institutions, it was clear that in the late 16th century in Venice, there was this. Obviously, we have the Council of Trent, which was reforming church practices, and there was this wave of conservativism in terms of religion, the Jesuits coming to town and all that that entailed. And so there was this wave of patronage to support these kinds of institutions. And the Socorso, many of the patrons who funded the Zitele, also funded and oversaw the Socorso.

[Yana Byers]

These are interesting edifices. They're meant. I mean, they're meant to cleanse, they're meant to protect. They're meant to. Like, there's this language of saving, but it really is about. I mean, in some ways, just. And closing again.

[Sandra Weddle]

Yep. Segregation. They're segregating again. And there's this idea. It's true, what you said, cleansing. Because there is this idea that if we can.

[Yana Byers]

It's.

[Sandra Weddle]

It's. It also brings to mind, of course, the Lazaretti, the. The Quarantine Islands. Right. Like, if we can keep these women away from all of these temptations and these bad influences for a certain period of time, they'll be cleansed and then we can send them back out again somehow, for sure. In the language of the architecture, I would say of the Zitelle, which wasn't a convent, and the Socorso, which was not a convent, it's really meant to look like a convent.

[Yana Byers]

Yeah. And. Yeah, yeah. And, yeah. Like, they're not gorgeous buildings, they're not welcoming institutions, but.

[Sandra Weddle]

No, I mean, they're dominated by church facades. Right. So the kind of morality of the institution is the billboard. You know, it's sort of the first face, the first architectural face.

[Yana Byers]

Yeah. And I mean, it feels like brothels. And these areas, these attempts to keep women in certain areas are about protecting the rest of the city from these women. And then we also want to keep, in the end, protect these women from the rest of the city. But it is just segregation. It's enclosure and segregation. Yeah. I want to ask some, like, giant and possible question. So Summarize the sex trade for me, will you? Can you do it? And you know, in about a minute, like, but I, I, that's impossible. But you know, what, what, what are we getting? What are, like, what's my takeaway from reading this book?

[Sandra Weddle]

I think the big takeaway has to do with the way in which these women, what's revealed is that these women exercised their agency and cultivated networks with other sex workers, with other workers around the city. They were inserted into their neighborhoods. And this really redefines the sex trade. Obviously it's centered on the body of the sex worker, but it includes patricians, it includes gondoliers, innkeepers, bathhouse keepers, fry shop workers, lodging house keepers. And so really trying to redefine what the sex trade was. And also another takeaway, I would say is just an alternative view of everyday life in Venice, which hopefully allows us to see the city itself in a different way. Another valence of the urban fabric.

[Yana Byers]

All right, I have taken up so much of your time, but I, I've, so I've got one more question, but it's a complete softball. What's next?

[Sandra Weddle]

Okay, what's next? So right now I'm collaborating with a group of Venetianists on a book tentatively called Logii Comuni Commonplaces that we hope will be published by Wetlands Press in 2027. Wetlands is a fantastic local Venice based publisher. And for that book I'm contributing four very short essays that really spin off my work on the sex trade. One chapter is on gondoliers. One chapter is on bath houses. One chapter is on the afterlife of rialto following the 1514 fire. And what I'm going to argue was a kind of period of gentrification after the 1514 fire. And then finally, and this one small chapter is hopefully going to be the foundation of a new book project looking at Forni. So Forni were neighborhood bread ovens where people would bring their bread dough to be baked. And I've already started building the foundation for this project. So I'm looking at where these bread ovens were, who owned them, how they functioned, what the work structure was. I'm looking at issues of resource management, like the transportation of water, the transportation of wood, the farming of grain. So I'm looking brought more broadly away from just the lagoon, but looking at the mainland as well. And this chapter for the Lwogi Comuni book is referencing the bread ovens as Venice's lost social infrastructure. So these ovens no longer exist, it seems. I'm constantly studying architecture that is no Longer existing. So when did these ovens disappear? How might that have changed? In some ways it's speculative, but how might that have changed neighborhood dynamics, where people would come together for exchanging information? All of those chapters started from the sex trade book. They have their roots in the sex trade book. But these short essays are giving me an opportunity to kind of delve more deeply into, for example, what was a bathhouse, how was it furnished, how did they function in their neighborhoods, et cetera. So that's the smaller project, and then the larger project I hope to pursue is this focus on the institution of the local bread oven.

[Yana Byers]

I love that. I love that idea. That's so cool.

[Sandra Weddle]

So more mapping?

[Yana Byers]

Yeah. I've lived on a call DEI Forni.

[Sandra Weddle]

Uh huh, yeah. Which one?

[Yana Byers]

In the. In the Castello. In the deepest, darkest castello. Via Garibaldi.

[Sandra Weddle]

Uh huh, yeah.

[Yana Byers]

Absolute end of the city. Good God. Yeah. Cool place to live, but holy mackerel, was I far from everything?

[Sandra Weddle]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. You really feel isolated out there.

[Yana Byers]

Yeah, they. I mean, they have a different dialect a little bit. The number of people I met in Venice was like, oh, I've never been out there. Okay. It's only 45 minute walk, but okay. Yeah, that's very Venetian. I cannot wait to read this. I'm really excited and I'm excited volume and I'm excited to see how it happens. And, you know, we'll talk after it's done. We'll do this again. Sandra, thanks so much. It's been an absolute joy to talk to you.

[Sandra Weddle]

Thank you. I really, really appreciate your interest in the book. And your work also had a role to play in it. You know, I mean, I think your understanding of women's experiences also really informed this work as well. So thanks for your work.

[Yana Byers]

That's so great to hear. Thanks a lot. All right. Ciao. Ciao.

[Sandra Weddle]

CIA.