Work, Play, and Violence in the Streets of Early Modern Bologna

The streets of early modern Bologna, Italy were sites of sociability, both friendship as well as enmity. Underneath the city’s famous arcades, artisans plied their wares from stalls, students jostled for precedence close to the walls, and liveried retainers cleared the way for their elite masters. Much of the city’s fragile civil society was conducted on these streets, where abstract social and economic hierarchies were made manifest. All of this was watched by the city’s powerful criminal court, which maintained a network of informants throughout the city to report immediately on breakdowns of civil peace or violations of local laws. Using a collection of reports by these “friends of the court” this paper argues that the covered walkways of Bologna were contested, liminal spaces in which boundaries between public and private were blurred. Artisans and shopkeepers claimed pieces of land as their own and grew indignant at intrusions on their territory; university students extended the territory of their colleges into the walkways outside. Here in the northern capital of the Papal state, workers gambled on their lunch breaks and fought over coins in full public view. The criminal court looked to regulate sociability on these streets by passing various edicts about public loitering, assembly in groups, and the behaviour of both students and artisans. However, the officers of the court, and its informants, were themselves players in the larger game of Bolognese sociability. Acting as a contested borderland between the roadway and the interiors of homes and shops, the city’s streets were the site of both cooperation and conflict, of sociability and strife. The complex dynamics of that street life reveal the fault lines inherent in Bologna’s civil society and shed light on the city’s high levels of violence in the early modern period.