CHAPTER ONE

THE BARFLYS DREAM:

TAVERNS AND REFORM
IN THE EARLY MODERN ITALIAN CITY
DAVID ROSENTHAL
UNIVERSITY OF EDINBURGH

When Bastiano de Rossi addressed the esteemed literati of Florences

Accademia della Crusca in 1593, he painted himself as a man in desperate
need of a drink. It was one of the Cruscas six-monthly stravizzilavish,
wine-sodden banquets for the investiture of new officialsand Bastiano,
one of the Cruscas founders and currently its secretary, gave a speech
entitled A ramble in praise of wine. He warned his colleagues that he
had some bad news, and began to tell them a story about how he had gone
to bed one night with an overpowering thirst, then dreamt of finding a
tavern in Florence in which he might quench it.1
In his dream, Bastiano materializes outside the gates of Florence, but
he is only forty feet from the walls so he knows he will find a watering
hole nearby. In front of him is the Porta alla Croce, the citys eastern gate.
I went inside in order to go to Michele del Bello, who has the tavern at
the side of the gate. But I found nobody there except a silly girl who told
me that neither master nor servant was around.2 He heads down Borgo la
Croce until it emerges into the Piazza Sant Ambrogio, then he swerves up
via dei Pilastri and down to the tavern of the Giardino [Garden]. But there
is nobody to be found at that osteria [tavern] either. On Bastiano goes.
And he keeps going, until he has taken himself around the entire city and
some thirty-odd taverns in what turns out to be a fruitless attempt to find a
pub that is open or an oste [tavernkeeper] who can serve him. In effect,
Bastiano traces out an imaginary pub crawl. It is the Florence of the barfly
flaneuras opposed, say, to the Florence of the nascent art pilgrim, to
whom Francesco Bocchi spoke in his well-known guidebook published
two years earlier, in 1591.3

The Barflys Dream

15

Bastianos comic anxiety dream frames a discussion that aims to shed

light on the biography or trajectory of the tavern in the early modern
Italian city, a subject still to attract sustained scholarly attention. It speaks
to both the social practices of drinking and the discursive worlds
surrounding and impacting on these practices.4 What Bastiano presents us
with, firstly, is the idea that taverns, like churches or certain streetcorners,
were glowing pins on the mental map Florentines had of their city; that
they exerted a kind of gravity, that tavern-going could at times determine
the itineraries of bodies, primarily male bodies, through urban space.
Unlike administrative and tax sources, which furnish the historian with an
essentially static city, his document indicates how many of the citys
inhabitants joined up the dots. Bastiano also suggests something about the
mediating role of the tavernkeeper, a figure who, as we shall see, has a
crucial part to play in his conceit. Lastly, Bastianos celebration of wine
was written at a moment of some significance in the biography of the
tavern in Italy, when carnivalesque transgressions clashed head on with
new religious and economic imperatives. Indeed, taverns in Florence, as
elsewhere, were also glowing pins on the urban map of Catholic reform,
veritable battlegrounds in a bid to refashion male behavior.

Taverns as Social Hubs

Bastiano de Rossi knew his taverns. Almost all of the osterie he
namechecks in his itinerary can be located in the ducal governments 1561
census of the citys shops, which included forty taverns. Bastianos
tavern at the side of the gate was the tavern at the Porta alla Croce on
the corner of the now-vanished via Gelsomino. His next stop, the better
known tavern of the Giardino, could be reached by heading from Piazza
Sant Ambrigo up via Pilastrias it is in his routeand then down
todays via del Pepe to the lost alley of via Giardino.5 Taverns such as
these, outside of the center, can be seen as junctions in an everyday
ecology of neighborhood, along with bakeries and other well-frequented if
more sparsely distributed shops, such as those of apothecaries. Like many
local shops, taverns were often located at streetcorners, and they were
linked to them as points of convergence in the social imagination. Do not
be caught at the streetcorners or in the taverns, a neighborhood
confraternity in Piazza Sant Ambrogio warned its members who were
claiming benefits for sicknessand in fact there was a streetcorner tavern
a few steps away from the confraternitys oratory.6
For Florences artisans and laborers, these neighborhood taverns had
always been arenas of male association. Indeed they had a role in shaping

16

Chapter One

strong occupational and class-based male solidarities, as happened during

the Ciompi wool worker revolt in 1378 and in the scattered cases of
industrial agitation that have come to light for the fifteenth and early
sixteenth centuries.7 In Bastiano de Rossis time evidence for lower class
male association based around taverns is richly furnished by the
carnivalesque brigades know as the potenze (powers). These brigades
flourished from the late fifteenth to early seventeenth centuries, at their
height carving up the city into as many as forty-five territories or
kingdoms. 8 Typically the hubs of these kingdoms were streetcorners,
and at festive timessuch as at May Day or at special politico-dynastic
celebrations of the Medici family such as the birth of an heirthey set up
wooden thrones on their corners and held court. Two potenze named
taverns as their residences. The Biliemme, a potenza of wool weavers in
the northern parish of San Lorenzo, based itself at the tavern at the Cella di
Ciardo, at the corner of via Ariento and via Panicale; while the Spalla met
at the Trave Torta [Warped Beam] at the southern foot of the Ponte alla
Carraia.9 Many other taverns were located precisely where potenze met,
such as the Fiascho DOro [Golden Flask] at the Canto al Monteloro in the
citys east, or the tavern at the Canto alla Macine in the north.10 During
festivities in 1588, one contemporary wrote that the Marquis of the
Nespola had a fine stage made in the little piazza of the tavern of the
Drago [Dragon], at the foot of the Ponte Vecchio.11
As potenze, the tavern took on a particular symbolic charge for these
men, since feasting and drinking were central to carnivalesque tropes of
inversion and excess: when the poor briefly became kings for a day,
they also appropriated the rich mans world of plenty. At celebrations in
1577 for the birth of an heir to Grand Duke Francesco de Medici, a
potenza based in Piazza San Lorenzo described how it had put up a sixyard high Bacchus, who carried a huge ewer that poured wine into a tub
from which anyone could fill their cup.12 Another king, in a list of his
festive expenses, reveals, indicatively, that he made his single biggest
payout that year for a feast, spending twenty-nine lire for a meal in the
house of the admiral, all his men and any others who wanted to come.
This wool worker king paid out a further six lire that day to Donato the
tavernkeeper for lots of wine, plus another twelve lire to a wineseller for
three barrels to give to drink to people, whoever wants to drink.13
Carnivalesque conventions demanded the king play a part in defraying the
costs of festivity, whether from his own pocket or, as in 1577, using
Medici donations. Indeed at special regime-sponsored festivities, the grand
dukea king himselfsupplied wine on the Piazza della Signoria all day
long.

The Barflys Dream

17

The potenze, whose active members numbered anywhere between fifty

and one hundred and fifty men, attest to the taverns role as more than a
hub of everyday social contact; it was, as Edward Muir has suggested for
Italy, an agent of community.14 Here, the figure of the tavernkeeper comes
into relief. The potenza of the Nespola at the Drago tavern, mentioned
above, brought together a disparate group of tradesmen: at various times
its core members included a mattress-maker, butcher, painter, barber,
flour-vendor and smith.15 In 1577, the men of the Nespola elected the
Dragos tavernkeeper, a certain Luigi di Bastiano, as their king.
Tavernkeepers such as Luigi can be seen as mediating figures; indeed such
men were cultivated because of the social and the material resources they
represented. Potenze leaders, who were often illiterate, sometimes asked
tavernkeepers to accompany them to the offices of various magistracies in
order to pen receipts or other documents. In 1610, the king of the Spalla,
an illiterate miller, called upon a tavernkeepermost likely the oste at the
Spallas Trave Tortato write both a receipt for Grand Duke Cosimo IIs
payout as well as a census the brigades were instructed to take of their
territories that year.16 At the same time, this tavernkeeper, Chimenti
Maroni, was one of two osti called to affirm the census of a brigade at the
Porta San Gallo gate, all the way up at the northern tip of the city.17 Very
few men appear among the leadership cohort of more than one potenza
nine out of 259 in 1610. Tellingly, two of them were tavernkeepers:
Maroni was one; another played the roles of secretary and counselor to
two groups that shared a border.18
While we still know too little about either the extent or the nature of
everyday social interaction between urban strata in Italian cities the tavern
was one of the ambiguously public-private spaces in which we can be sure
that social boundaries became more porous. Here, again, the tavernkeeper
was a mediating figure, or so the words of an oste in Venice offering to
spy on his clientele for the government suggest: As a tavernkeeper I have
the true way of hearing, dealing, and reporting because every quality of
people come to my place, and I can make them familiarize with me.19
From the outset of his comic oration, Bastiano de Rossi associated tavern
with tavernkeeper, recounting how he had sought out Michele del Bello
at the Porta alla Croce gate; and later, after exhausting almost every tavern
in the city, how he had spotted Stivale of the Porco [Pig], the sight of
whom comforted me, and rushed to ask him why all the taverns in
Florence were shut down. Indeed, tavernkeepers themselves represented
an important first point of contact between elite clienteles and artisan
Florence. Without exception tavernkeepers were the renter-operators
rather than the owners of the taverns they ran; the owners, as was typical

18

Chapter One

of property in Florence and other Italian cities, were mainly patrician

families and ecclesiastical institutions. In the governments census of 1561
about eighty-five per cent of these tavernkeepers were men without a
family name, just a patronymic and sometimes a nickname, such as
Mariano di Betto detto falefeste [Mariano di Betto called the party-maker],
who had been running the tavern near the southern gate of the Porta
Romana for a year; or Bartolomeo di Tomasso detto il morte [the deathly
one], who had kept the Baldracca near the Bargello or palace of justice for
around the same length of time.20
Without doubt, the main arena for tavern-based contact between
Florentine men of all backgrounds was the city centerdense with shops
and markets, alive with the rhythms of work, commerce and shopping,
criss-crossed daily by hundreds if not thousands of individual journeys. In
the center, taverns had a social, spatial and imaginary character all of their
own. They were so well known that Galileo, in the early 1590s, could
confidently throw out the names of just a few of them to help him nail his
argument against the toga or academic gown, which was that clothes do
not make the man. Instead men were made like flasks. When you go to
the tavern in summer, to the Bertuccie, Porco, Sant Andrea, to the
Chiassolino or Malvagia, Galileo said, you will see that the flasks are not
very fancy but instead reveal the excellent red wine within.21 These
taverns were clearly a magnet for many Florentine men, their barkeeps
well known around the city. In 1577, one illiterate potenza king in the
northern parishes sought out a tavernkeeper in the tavern of Sant
Andreabeside the central market, the Mercato Vecchioto write for
him at the ducal treasury.22 It was in the taverns of the center that Bastiano
de Rossis imaginary pub crawl (and one assumes many actual drinking
bouts) ended up: ultimately at the Porco and Fico [Fig], two taverns more
or less opposite each other in alleyways off the via Calzaiuoli, the major
processional and commercial thoroughfare connecting the Duomo to the
Palazzo Vecchio. Among tavernkeepers themselves, the Porco was
considered one of the principal inns of the city. This was where the two
men elected to visit the sick of the tavernkeepers confraternity of San
Martino went every week to consult a list of the brothers who needed to be
encouraged to confess and take communion.23
Apart from drinking and eating, these taverns also loomed large in a
city-center topography of gambling and sex. Indeed, when it came to
regulating tavern culture, Florentine governments did not have a lot to say
about drinking, but repeatedly banned all kinds of games in any tavern of
the city of Florence, either on the little walls outside or on the tables of
those taverns.24 One catches glimpses of this gambling culture from court

The Barflys Dream

19

cases, such as one back in 1433 in which a group of men were prosecuted
for gambling in Piazza Sant Andrea, including a cloth merchant from
Pisa, a wool cloth manufacturer, a worker in the governments forced
loans office and a belt-maker. It turned out that the cook at the
neighboring tavern of Sant Andrea had supplied the dice.25 The Fico
became notorious, or notorious again, in 1501, due to the case of a certain
Antonio Rinaldeschi, who threw horseshit at a tabernacle of the Virgin
after losing at dice in that tavern, a crime for which he was hanged from
the windows of the Bargello.26 Meanwhile, the warren of streets between
the Mercato Vecchio and the Florentine Baptistry contained the citys
public brothel from 1403 until the creation of the ghetto in 1571; and the
osterie of that zone were nightly venues for contact between pimps and
prostitutes and their clients.27 In the rich Florentine lexicon of doubleentendre, city-center taverns, as Guido Ruggiero has pointed out, had highly
suggestive names: Bertuccie [Monkey, or Pussy], Chiassolino [Alley, or
Little Whorehouse], Fico [Fig, or Cunt], Porco [Pig/Depraved].28 The same
taverns, especially Sant Andrea and the Buco [Hole] near the Palazzo
Vecchio, were also regular rendezvous for male sodomy, a widespread
practice that involved liaisons between men of every rank.29 In Florences
hypersexualized Carnival song literature, where double-entendreand
sodomywas everything, the word osteria itself signified the arse, while
barfly [taverniere] was another way of saying sodomite. Indeed several
times in this sixteenth-century literature the taverns of the Fico and Buco
appear together to signify vaginal and anal sex. In one poem, Alfonso de
Pazzis Song of the Barflies, penned in the late 1540s, the barflies
address the ladies (the standard format of the genre, though there is a sly
understanding that Carnival ladies often referred to cross-dressed men)
to imply that while they preferred sodomy they would go to the tavern of
the Fico since the Buco was closed for non-payment of taxes.30
In his dream, Bastiano de Rossi finally fetches up at the tavern of the
Fico, where Silvio, honored by the herdsmen and godfather of some of
you is packing up, and there he discovers why he cannot get a drink in
Florence that day: everyone has gone off for a special meeting of the
tavernkeepers guild to hear about a catalogue of crimes perpetrated
against the trade by the members of the Accademia della Crusca. Bastiano
tags along. He sees the tavernkeepers show up in a sumptuous procession.
There is a king. There is a hierarchy of senators, the most important of
whom, representing the citys most important taverns, sit closest to the
monarch. It is a micro-state of publicans, a burlesque mirror of ducal
government (or the government of the Crusca for that matter). The
denunciations begin. The tavernkeeper of the Porco says he was tripped up

20

Chapter One

by a member of the Crusca while delivering food to the table. One

bartender says he was given a smack for not serving fast enough. Another
was lampooned in song; another was told his boiled eggs were inedible.
Bastiano himself is accused of not paying his bar tab. Even the dead, the
ghost of a bar servant who once worked at the Buco, makes an appearance
to condemn the members of the Crusca. At the end of it all the king passes
a terrible sentence: from now on the Cruscanti will only be served wine
from Cinque Terre, or even less palatable plonk if that is available.
Bastiano is so traumatized by this turn of events that he wakes up. Worse,
when he runs off to the Fico to tell his friend Silvio about his dream, he
discovers it is all true. His oration ends with an appeal to the Counsels of
the Crusca to make amends. Otherwise the Cruscanti may be forced into
exile in order to get a decent glass of wine.
Bastiano precisely tailored his oration for its liminal moment at the
Crusca and its carnivalesque excesses. It was an exuberant love letter to
wine: Oh precious liquor, for that is what you truly are, with your ruby
color you cheer the hearts of the living, with your odor you comfort them,
with your taste you revive them. What can one do without you? What can
one say? What can one think?31 It was also a love letter to the tavern,
which he imagines as a carnivalesque space in which boundaries were
easily and legitimately permeablebetween restraint and excess, and
between men of different rank; a space, indeed, where plebeian
tavernkeepers, the gatekeepers who regulated entry to that prized milieu,
were kings. Bastiano, like any Florentine, was clearly familiar with his
city's streetcorner kingdoms and the tropes of status-inversion within
which they paraded themselves on the festive stage; in fact, a potenza
kingdom specifically of Tavernkeepers emerges in the sources in the
early seventeenth century, and may well have existed earlier, enmeshed
with the occupational confraternity of San Martino.32
No doubt Bastianos portrayal of a faintly ludicrous, vendetta-hungry
nobility of drink would have gone down a hoot among his learned
brothers in the academy. Yet at the same time it recognized the actual
social importance of these men and of the taverns they ruled. There is a
mid-sixteenth century short story by the Florentine satirist Antonfrancesco
Grazzinia co-founder, with Bastiano, of the Accademia della Crusca in
1583that similarly invests the tavern with profound social importance.
The story involves a cruel trick, or beffa, played on a physician called
Manente, who was kidnapped after being left drunk one night outside his
customary haunt, the city-center osteria of the Bertuccie.33 A rumor is
spread about that Manente is dead, so that when he is released and returns
to Florence months later none of his friends recognize him. Even his wife

The Barflys Dream

21

thinks he is a ghost. Manente takes refuge in the Bertuccie, where at first

not even his close friend the tavernkeeper is sure it is him. Eventually he
engineers a gathering of his old drinking cronies around a table at the
tavern. They notice he drinks two glasses of wine before touching his
salad, just as Manente used to do. He will not eat sweet food, which was
also disdained by Manente. Then one of his friends sees that he has a
birthmark in the shape of a wild boar. Suddenly they know him; his reidentification is complete. Grazzinis story is meant to point up the
arbitrary and unjust power of princes, since the kidnapper and trickster in
question is Lorenzo de Medici. Yet what is just as interesting here is that
Grazzini chose a well-known tavern (and the minutiae of social drinking
and eating that took place within it) as the place where Lorenzos trick
comes undone. In the tavern, Manente is finally found, his social being
rehabilitated, after having been, in effect, lost.

The Dynamic of Reform

Bastianos Ramble in Praise of Wine was written at a moment when the
tavern had become a fiercely contested site, a battleground for Catholic
reformers. To be sure, the tavern had always exercised moralists. As others
have pointed out, it was no accident that so much was made of the case of
the gambler Antonio Rinaldeschi, who was hanged for throwing
excrement at an image of the Virgin in 1501. Florence at this time was still
in the grip of the teachings of the recently executed Dominican preacher
Girolamo Savonarola and his millenarian ambitions to create a new
Jerusalem on the Arno. Rinaldeschis cautionary tale was even the subject
of a didactic painting, probably placed in the oratory that was built around
the Virgin he assaulted.34 However, the last decades of the sixteenth
century, following the Council of Trent (1545-63), witnessed a more
sustained bid to draw strict boundaries between the world of the sacred
church and that of the profane tavernwhere God does not liveand to
Christianize the sinners and wastrels who frequented the latter.
Following Trent, Florentine synodal laws of 1573, backed up by parish
visitations, looked to police that boundary through confraternities, the
ubiquitous face of formal lay association in Italian cities. They banned
meals on saints days and drinking parties in the oratories of these
corporations.35 As one neighborhood confraternity put it in 1585, after it
had been ordered to abolish the meal it held to celebrate a local cult: On
feast days, introduced for the cult and for service to God, we should all the
more abstain from wantonness and scurrilous talk and the lazy and idle
behavior that is encouraged by wine, the minister of jokes, laughter and

22

Chapter One

acts unfitting to cloistered and holy places.36 At the same time,

injunctions in ecclesiastically supervised confraternal statute books to
avoid the tavern became more shrill, and such prohibitions became central
to the doctrinal schools that reformers encouraged confraternities to set up
for children. A rule book belonging to one school of the spirit set up in
1575 warned its students that they were above all prohibited when they
are outside our meeting place from going to any place where you eat,
drink, gamble and other such things, since many men are lost due to this,
because greed destroys every good emotion.37 Even the tavernkeepers
confraternity officially frowned on lock-ins, forbidding their brothers to
stay shut with people inside in order to serve food and drink.38
Meanwhile, punishments for gambling in taverns or other, more fully,
public spaces became progressively harsher. In the 1560s a lawbreaker
might have to endure the common torture of one or two drops on the rope
[strappado] and a modest fine, but by 1585 this was coupled to a three
strikes and youre out policy. Literally out, sent off to the galleys at the
grand dukes pleasure.39
Florences most spectacular anti-taverns moment came in 1588, five
years before Bastianos paean to wine, and it was an event that speaks
volumes about the rhetorical and regulatory atmosphere in which he was
writing. In the spring of that year, in the wake of an intensive preaching
campaign against tavern-going over Easter, all the big textile corporations
of the cityrepresenting several thousand menvoted almost
unanimously to strip their members of all the offices and honors they
love if they were caught in the tavern, with expulsion for repeat
offences.40 The use and frequenting of public taverns not only stands
against all polite and civil life but also against Christian life, the silk
weavers wrote into their book of deliberations.41 The confraternity of the
cloth dyers, seeking ducal ratification for their new anti-taverns statute,
wrote that they were moved to do this for their own universal benefit, and
in order to do something pleasing to Your Most Serene Highness and to
honor God and [their patron saint] San Onofrio.42 A few days later the
confraternities staged pious processions from the Duomo to the miracleworking Marian shrine at the Florentine church of the Santissima
Annunziata in order to seal this state-endorsed pact of abstinence: with
each other, with God and with the grand duke.
This was the public face of the new anti-taverns contract, and it was
incorporated into the governments general reform of Wool Guild
regulations the following year.43 But could the ban be made to stick? In
order to enforce it, the confraternities set up a regime of surveillance
whereby police officials or anyone else of good reputation could claim a

The Barflys Dream

23

small reward for shopping transgressors. In one of the first, and few
surviving, denunciations, from September 1588, seven brothers of the
confraternity of silk-weavers claimed to have caught another four,
including a serving confraternal captain, drinking in the Trave Torta.44
However the denunciation system soon began to crumble. Not only was it
open to opportunistic abuse, more fundamentally it was unsustainable for
elective and participatory bodies whose sacred bedrock was unity and
peace. In 1591, the silk-weavers faced that reality and flip-flopped, now
prohibiting brothers from testifying against each other.45 In effect this was
an admission that the taverns ban was too divisive, unenforceable, and that
support for it had never been as universal as the original votes suggested.
Failure or not, the attempt to outlaw tavern-going in 1588 reveals a
great deal about the disciplinary and self-disciplining currents rippling
through urban culture in the late sixteenth century. In the first place, it was
directed at what was clearly perceived as a problem of male culture. The
cloth dyers wrote of how they wanted to promote the universal peace and
quiet of each person, so that they should have more chance of living in a
Christian fashion, enjoying the fruits of their labor with their families.46
The silk weavers said tavern-going was damaging the souls of Christians,
and destroying their houses, children and families.47 If a brother was
caught in the tavern and lost his benefits, or was expelled, this punishment
specifically excluded the confraternal alms paid to his wife and the
dowries for his daughters. A couple of years before the ban, the silk
weavers found that officials charged with delivering alms to the poor of
the house were going off with the recipients and drinking the money in
the tavern. The cash was diverted to increase the payment made to
members wives after childbirth.48 Indeed, the economy of moral reform
arguably turned around substituting the sinful expenditure of men for
charity that protected women and children, attacking male sin while
promoting female honor. The cash saved from banning confraternal feasts
was overwhelmingly redirected to dowries, to an ideal of female and
familial integrity; in fact, there was an explosion of confraternal dowry
funds between the 1570s and early 1600s.49
What is also clear from the 1588 campaign against the taverns and its
context is that these attempts to reform male culture, to create good
masculinities, tended to be framed in terms of class: the tavern was
perceived above all as a problem of lower class men. Almost all the men
in the textile industry confraternities were non-citizens or plebeians. In
the case of the cloth dyers, where the shop owners were sometimes men
who belonged to noble families and who sat in the dyers confraternity as
masters, tavern-going was only prohibited for laborers. When these

24

Chapter One

same laborers formed their own sub-confraternity a few years later, in

1595, apparently inspired by their Franciscan spiritual guide, the dyers
chief official remarked that this revealed a righteous zeal, in showing that
they wanted to do a beneficial thing for their souls and remove themselves
from gambling and the tavern.50
In effect artisan men were coerced, exhorted and persuaded to become
agents of their own redemptionand the ducal state increasingly found
itself in alignment with the mainly clerical leaders of reform due to the
growing signs of pauperization towards the end of the sixteenth century, as
food became more expensive, the urban population grew and the textile
economy shrank.51 Indeed the 1588 campaign gained momentum because
Florences new grand duke, Ferdinando I de Medici, had made it clear
that, after opening up the citys grain warehouses at below the market rate
following a poor harvest, he wanted his subjects to stop frequenting
taverns. Similarly, ducal legislation against gambling revealed that
anxieties tended, again, to focus on lower class men. Beyond the tavern,
the government kept adding to the list of gambling no-go areas, and, in a
law of 1579, said that because lower class men had perverted the few
places where it was still permitted with dishonest games, the ban would be
extended from taverns, streets and piazzas to houses, loggias, gardens and
shops. By 1585 gambling along the city walls was out too, and also along
the banks of the Arno.52

Conclusion
Bastiano de' Rossi's comic oration to the Accademia della Crusca throws
light on a chapter in the biography of the tavern in Florence, and on a
complex moment of cultural struggle and social change in the Italian city.
Less than two decades after Bastiano delivered his oration, in 1610,
Florences plebeian tavern-based kings were partially suppressed by
Grand Duke Cosimo II de Medici, their carnivalesque ritual undermined
by a powerful nexus of economic and religious imperatives and, a
corollary to this, by the sharper social and cultural boundaries of class that
had emerged in ducal Florence and elsewhere in sixteenth-century Italy.53
Bastiano, in opposition to the often blistering invective directed against
Carnival and its unholy taverns by reformers, instead pitched the osteria as
a carnivalesque site in entirely positive terms, an idealized locus of
transgressive excess. And in opposition to the characterization of the
tavern as a haunt of dissolute lower class men, he idealized it as a socially
liminal space, one with shared behavioral vocabularies and where casual
associations could become deeper familiarities. Bastiano's fiction may

The Barflys Dream

25

have closed the tavern doors to the arrogant members of the Crusca, and so
pointed up underlying class distinctions and tensions, but in appropriately
carnivalesque fashion it looked to redress and dissolve such grievances
through a cathartic inversion of status. We are yet to excavate how the
actual social practices of tavern-going changed in the Tridentine city,
between the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Certainly,
Florence's taverns remained in business and no doubt continued to be
frequented by elite as well as artisan men, especially in the city center. Yet
in the context of reform, Bastiano's defense of wine and the public osteria
at a private banquet of literati is perhaps some indication that the tavern
was on the decline as a productive space of socially heterogeneous male
community in the urban world.

Notes
1

Bastiano de Rossi, Cicalata in lode del vino, in Prose fiorentine (Florence,

1716-45), part 3, vol. 2, 1-24. The Accademia della Crusca was officially founded
in 1583.
2
Vengo via, e men entro dentro per andare a Michel del Bello, che fa la taverna
allato alla porta, ma non vi trovo, se non una donniciuola, che mi dice, che non v
n garzone n maestro. De Rossi, Cicalata in lode del vino, 9.
3
Francesco Bocchi, The Beauties of the City of Florence: A Guidebook of 1591,
trans. Thomas Frangenberg and R. Williams (London: Harvey Miller Publishers,
2006).
4
As Thomas Brennan points out in his recent multi-volume collection, the
Mediterranean remains understudied in comparison to northern and central Europe.
Thomas Brennan, Public Drinking in the Early Modern World: Voices from the
Tavern, 1500-1800, 5 vols (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2011), vol. 1, vii. For
Italy, Giovanni Cherubini, Il lavoro, la taverna, la strada: scorci d Medioevo
(Naples: Liguori, 1997).
5
Archivio di Stato di Firenze (hereafter ASF), Decima granducale (hereafter DG),
3780, fols. 99r, 101v.
6
Et che qualunque di detta compagnia ragionassi dessa in su canti o alle taverne
caggia in pena di soldi dua per volta, et lo scrivano che a quel tempo sar sia tenuto
porlo a specchio. ASF, Compagnie Religiose Sorpresse (hereafter, CRS),
Capitoli, 45, fol. 46 (S Michele della Pace, SS Sacramento di SantAmbrogio,
1560). ASF, DG, 3780, fol. 100v (Cnr of Piazza Sant Ambrogio and via Pentolini,
now via dei Macci).
7
For example, in 1508 the Wool Guild said that the wool trimmers met in taverns
to conspire against the guild and fix prices. See Richard Trexler, Public Life in
Renaissance Florence (New York: Academic Press, 1980), 414; Ilaria Taddei,
Per la salute dellanima e del corpo: Artigiani e le loro confraternite, in Arti
Fiorentine: La Grande Storia dell'artigianato, ed. Franco Franceschi and Gloria
Fossi (Florence: Giunti, 1998), vol. 2, 143-44. See also Samuel Cohn, The

26

Chapter One

Laboring Classes in Renaissance Florence (New York: Academic Press, 1980),

168-70; Franco Franceschi, Oltre il "Tumulto": i lavoratori fiorentini dell'Arte
della lana fra Tre e Quattrocento (Florence: Olschki, 1993), 320ff. In 1443,
German wool weavers who later would be central to the Biliemme and Camaldoli
potenze, conspired against the Wool Guild, organized by the Camaldoli German
confraternity of Santa Caterina, which was known to have met in taverns.
Franceschi, Oltre il "Tumulto," 325. See also Franco Franceschi, I tedeschi e l'arte
della lana a Firenze fra Tre e Quattrocento, in Dentro la citt: stranieri e realt
urbane nell'Europa dei secoli XII XVI, ed. Gabriella Rossetti (Naples: Liguori,
1989), 275-76. See also the case of Buia in the Veneto, in which the village
defense of a man resisting arrest by outside police officials began in the tavern:
Edward Muir, The Idea of Community in Renaissance Italy, Renaissance
Quarterly 55 (2002): 1-18.
8
On the potenze, see most recently David Rosenthal, Owning the Corner: The
Powers of Florence and the Question of Agency, I Tatti Studies 16, nos. 1-2
(2013): 181-96. Forthcoming is Kings of the Street: Power, Community and Ritual
in Renaissance Florence (Turnhout: Brepols).
9
For these taverns, ASF, DG, 3780, 120r, 20r. The location of potenze, listed in a
number of sources, is most clearly set out in a government census of the brigades
of 1610. ASF, Capitani di Parte, numeri neri (hereafter, Parte), 1478, fol. 70.
10
ASF, DG, 3780, fols. 103v, 116v.
11
in su la Piazzola dellOsteria del Drago, il Marchese dell Nespola aveva fatto
fare un bel palco Biblioteca Riccardiana di Firenze, Fondo palagi, 70 (Piccolo
diario delle cose della citt di Firenze dallanno 1580 alli 30 Aprile, sino al 1589),
fol. 123. ASF, DG, 3780, 11r. For the Nespola king in 1577, ASF, Parte, 738, fol.
186.
12
Ioseppo Paganone, Ordini, feste, et pompe fatte dal re della graticola, & suoi
dignissimi ufitiali, nella natiuit del sereniss. principe di Toscana in Firenze
MDLXXVII (Florence: Marescotti, Giorgio, 1577), fol. 3v.
13
Ad [May] 25 detto lire ventinove soldi 9 danari servino per uno disinare in
casa lamiralio haverne tutti i suoi omini e quelli che volssero venire a quello
desinare; lire sei a donato oste per tanto vino che servi a detto desinare in casa
lamiralio; lire dodeci a lorenzo vinatiere per tre barili di vino servi per dar bere
a popoli a chi voleva bere. On the day of ducal birth itself, May 20, he spent
twelve lire for tanto vino at the tavole de soldati in casa Lorenzo di Borgo del
Prato. Overall, this king, Francesco of the Camaldoli brigade in Santo Spirito,
spent one-quarter of its fifty scudi on food and drink. ASF, Parte, 739, fol. 176.
14
Muir, The Idea of Community in Renaissance Italy, 10-11.
15
For the Nespolas personnel, ASF, Parte, 738, fol. 186 (1577); Parte, 1478, fols.
213r, 240r (1610).
16
ASF, Parte, 1478, fols. 205r, 206r, 236r.
17
The potenza of the Camporeggi in via San Gallo. ASF, Parte, 1478, fol. 175r.
The viceroy of the Gatta also asked a tavernkeeper to sign his receipt for him in
1610. ASF, Parte, 1478, fols. 208r, 231r.

The Barflys Dream

27

18
This tavernkeeper, Pasquino Bartolini, was a counselor of the Rondini at the
Canto alla Rondini and the secretary of the Mela (Apple) at the eponymous
streetcorner. ASF, Parte, 1478, fols. 149r, 153r, 228r, 229r.
19
Filippo de Vivo, Information and Communication in Venice: Rethinking Early
Modern Politics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 96.
20
ASF, DG, 3780, fols. 9r, 70r. Out of 35 taverns located in the census, five
tavernkeepers had family names.
21
Galileo Galilei, Against the Donning of the Gown (Contro il portar la toga),
trans. Giovanni Bignami (London: Moon Books, 2000), 39. On this text, see also
Jonathan Davies, Culture and Power: Tuscany and its Universities 1537-1609
(Leiden: Brill, 2009), 134.
22
The king of the Guelfa potenza, in the street of the same name. ASF, Depositera
generale, parte antica, 984, ins. 63.
23
ASF, CRS, Capitoli 197, fols. 35-36. The surviving statutes are from 1681 but
the confraternity was founded in 1542; ASF, CRS, Capitoli 197, fol. 1
24
It was forbidden to giuocare a giuoco di sorte alcuna in alcuna Taverna della
Citt di Fiorenze, n in su i muricciuoli fuora or su le tavole di esse Taverne.
Lorenzo Cantini, Legislazione toscana, 32 vols (Florence: Albizziniana, 1800), 5,
239 (December 14, 1565).
25
Gene Brucker, The Society of Renaissance Florence (New York and London:
Harper & Row, 1971), 183-84.
26
William J. Connell and Giles Constable, Sacrilege and Redemption in
Renaissance Florence: The Case of Antonio Rinaldeschi (Toronto: Centre for
Renaissance and Reformation Studies, 2005).
27
Maria Mazzi Serena, Prostitute e lenoni nella Firenze del Quattrocento (Milan:
Saggiatore, 1991). See also Nicholas Terpstra, Lost Girls: Sex and Death in
Renaissance Florence (Baltimore, MD: John Hopkins University Press, 2010),
chap. 2; John Brackett, The Florentine Onest and the Control of Prostitution,
1403-1680, The Sixteenth Century Journal 24 (1993): 273-300.
28
Guido Ruggiero, Mean Streets, Familiar Streets, or the Fat Woodcarver and the
Masculine Spaces of Renaissance Florence, in Renaissance Florence: A Social
History, ed. Roger Crum and John T. Paoletti (New York: Cambridge University
Press, 2006), 304.
29
Michael Rocke, Forbidden Friendships: Homosexuality and Male Culture in
Renaissance Florence (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 154ff.
30
Aldo Castellani, Nuovi canti carnascialeschi Di Firenze: Le "canzone" e
mascherate di Alfonso de'Pazzi (Florence: Olschki, 2006), 182-85. For other
examples of the Fico and Buco paired together, see Riccardo Bruscagli, Trionfi e
canti carnascialeschi Toscani del Rinascimento (Roma: Salerno, 1986), vol. 1, 3637, 295. On cross-dressing, see Laura Ruggiero, When Male Characters Pass as
Women: Theatrical Play and Social Practice in the Italian Renaissance, The
Sixteenth Century Journal 36, no. 3 (2005): 743-60.
31
O prezioso liquore, tu se pur quello, che col tuo colo rubinoso allegro il cuore
de viventi, col tuo odore gli conforti, col tuo sapor gli vivifichi. Che si pu fare
senza te, che si pu dire, che si pu pensare. De Rossi, Cicalata, fol. 2.

28

Chapter One

32
The Tavernkeepers, li huomini, osti e potentia loro (the men, tavernkeepers
and their potenza), appear in 1612, as well as in a 1629 government list of
potenze: ASF, Parte, 1479, fol. 352r; Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale di Firenze,
Fondo Principale, II. IV. 330, fols. 333-5.
33
Antonfrancesco Grazzini, Le cene, ed. Riccardo Bruscagli (Rome: Salerno,
1976). In translation: The Story of Doctor Manente Being the Tenth and Last Story
from the Suppers of Antonfrancesco Grazzini called II Lasca, trans. and intro. D.
H. Lawrence (Florence: G. Orioli, 1929). See also on this tale, which was not
published until the eighteenth century, Mary M. Gallucci, Occult Power: The
Politics of Witchcraft and Superstition in Renaissance Florence, Italica 80, no. 1
(Spring, 2003): 1-20. On Grazzini, see Robert Rodini, Antonfrancsco Grazzini.
Poet, Dramatist, Novelliere (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1970). The
Bertuccie was in the Chiasso dell Bertuccie (now Vicolo del Bazar) off the Corso.
34
Connell and Constable, Sacrilege and Redemption. For a recent survey of
Savonarola in Florence, see Donald Weinstein, Savonarola: The Rise and Fall of a
Renaissance Prophet (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2011).
35
The law was repeated and tightened up in 1589. Ildefonso di San Luigi (ed.),
Etruria Sacra (Florence: Apud Caietanum Cambiasium, 1782), 164 (Synod of
1573, rub. 51, 3) and 181 (Synod of 1589, De confraternitatibus).
36
Quoted in Ronald Weissman, Ritual Brotherhood in Renaissance Florence (New
York: Academic Press, 1982), 224.
37
Sopratutti gli si proibisce come cosa molto pregiudichevole fuori delle nostre
ogni ritrovata dove si mangi beva giuchi e simili che per questo verso molti
huomini si sono persi per distruggere la gola ogni buon sentimento. Regole,
no.10, insert in ASF, CRS, Capitoli, 827. Doctrinal education in Florence is amply
set out in Gilberto Aranci, Formazione religiosa e santita laicale a firenze tra
cinque e seicento (Florence: G. Pagnini, 1997).
38
ASF, CRS, Capitoli, 197, fol. 58.
39
Cantini, Legislazione, vol. 5, 239 (1565); vol. 13, 192 (1585).
40
.. privati di tutti gli ufizzi e honori che amano The quote is from the dyers
confraternity of San Onofrio. Istituto Horne, Tintori, A.IV.3, fol. 129v.
41
Atteso come sia non solo contro a ogni vivere politicho et civili, ma etiam
contro a vivere christiano luso et frequentia dalla publicha osteria, et in danno
delle anime christiane, destrutione delle proprie case, figli et famiglie; ASF, CRS,
677, fol. 9r-v. On the taverns ban, see Giuliano de Ricci, Cronaca (1532-1606),
ed. Giuliana Sapori (Milan: Ricciardi, 1972), 515; Agostino Lapini, Diario
Fiorentino di Agostino Lapini: Dal 252 al 1596 (Florence: G. C. Sansoni, 1900),
267-68. A well-informed account was made by an anonymous chronicler of the
1580s. Biblioteca Riccardiana di Firenze, Fondo palagi, 70 (Piccolo diario delle
cose della citt di Firenze dallanno 1580 alli 30 Aprile, sino al 1589), fols. 11617.
42
Si sono mossi a questo per benefizio universale di fatti loro, et per fare cosa
grata a V.A.S. et per honore Dio et di S Honofrio. Istituto Horne, Tintori, A.IV.3,
fol. 130r.
43
Cantini, Legislazione, 12, 364-67.

The Barflys Dream

44

29

ASF, CRS, 677, fol. 13r

ASF, CRS, 677, fol. 33v.
46
Item, considerati molti inconveniente che nascono per la frequenza dell taverne
e hosterie e volendo a quelli oviare et provedere alla quiete e pace universale di
ciascuno ... che piu si habbino occasione di Cristianamente vivere e di godersi le
fatiche di .. con le loro povere famiglie. Istituto Horne, Tintori, A.IV.3, fol. 129r.
47
Atteso come sia non solo contro a ogni vivere politicho et civili, ma etiam
contro a vivere christiano, luso et frequentia dalla publicha osteria et in danno
delle anime christiane, destrutione delle proprie case, figli et famiglie, et volendo
in quanto possano a tanto male et disordine insalute dall'anime loro, et de loro
fratelli, et altri della loro compagnia. ASF, CRS, 677, fol. 9r
48
ASF, CRS, 677, fol. 5r.
49
Maria Fubini Leuzzi, Condurre a Onore: Famiglia, matrimonio e assistenza
dotale a Firenze in et moderna (Florence: Olschki, 1999), chap. 4
50
e questo apariva buono zelo, solo dimostravano di volere fare cosa grata per
lanime loro e per levarsi da il guocho e osterie. Istituto Horne, Tintori, A.III.1,
fol. 100r (1603).
51
R. Burr Litchfield, Emergence of a Bureaucracy: The Florentine Patricians,
1530-1790 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987), chap. 12.
52
Cantini, Legislazione, vol 9, 162-4 (1579); vol. 13, 192 (1585).
53
See David Rosenthal, The Spaces of Plebeian Ritual and the Boundaries of
Transgression, in Renaissance Florence: A Social History, ed. Roger Crum and
John Paoletti (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 161-81.
45