The early modern Venetian sex trade focused on the sex worker but also encompassed a host of others who collaborated with and profited from her labor. Her social and commercial associates could include procuresses, procurers, and clients, but also bathhouse keepers, innkeepers, lodging housekeepers, domestic workers, bakers, fry shop workers, gondoliers, landlords, and others. Visualizing these relationships as a braided network produces an understanding of the trade as a dynamic practice in which actors both diverged from and exerted force over one another as their priorities and circumstances demanded or allowed. The convergence points where the strands of this network intersected are the places on which this talk focuses.
Sex workers resisted state-sponsored efforts to segregate them at the municipal brothels in the Rialto commercial district; instead, they gravitated to neighbourhoods where low rents and potentially advantageous alliances could be found. Archival sources, including legislation, censuses, criminal records, tax declarations, and others, support analysis of local relationships and the urban environment that shaped them. Portraits of the parishes of Santa Margherita, San Moisè, San Luca, and San Marcuola reveal the complex dynamics of individual neighbourhoods, demonstrating the ways in which the sex trade integrated into local life, and assigning previously unconsidered meanings to everyday locations and spatial conditions.
Saundra Weddle is a Distinguished Professor of Architectural and Urban History and Theory at the Hammons School of Architecture at Drury University in Springfield, Missouri (USA). Her research focuses on gender and architecture in early modern Italian cities, including publications addressing the form and function of convent architecture. Her recent book, The Brothel and Beyond (Penn State Press, 2025) examines architectural and urban strategies of segregation and mobility as expressed in Venice’s heterosexual sex trade.
