Venice: A Second-Hand City? - Recycled Goods
Venice: Second-Hand City?
Jewish ghetto
Jews were seen as a threat to Christianity, and in Venice a ghetto was created. But despite this, there appears to be evidence of Venetian Jews being protected. Take a look at the evidence in Jewish Ghetto.
The second-hand trade in Venice was well established, with clothing and furniture regularly borrowed and rented.
Venice was famous for its glassware, furniture and fabrics but few originals survive because they were recycled and remade into new things.
For special events whole rooms were furnished and decorated with rented goods, with the dealers acting as interior designers. An inventory of the goods of Henry Wotton, English Ambassador, listed a number of rented items: a billiards table, gondola, beds, sheets, awnings and firearms.
At the other extreme, 17th century governmental records show the paper industry was running out of source material, so they encouraged people to save their rags, and inventories of second-hand dealers' shops also list bags of rags.
Second-hand dealers also acted as pawnbrokers, and in desperate circumstances desperate measures were taken to raise money. There are even records of wives and children being pawned.
Trade guilds, like that of the second-hand dealers, were an essential part of Renaissance town life. They regulated the supply of goods, mediated in disputes and supported members financially, spiritually and socially.
Contemporary accounts suggest that this trade was used to lure women into prostitution. They were tempted by beautiful garments and then, finding no way to pay off their debts, were forced to prostitute themselves. Men dressed sumptuously as well. Pietro Aretino wrote in letters in the early 16th century about gifts of clothing from patrons. He described the weight of gold trimmings and the sensuous feel of silk against the skin. So, dressing up can't have just been for show, there was a lot of enjoyment in it as well.
Evidence
Register of the Guild of Second-hand Dealers from fourteen thirty to the beginning of the seventeenth century (held in Museo Correr)
For Coryat: "The fairest place of all the citie .... is the...Market place of St Marke". So Patricia was surprised to discover that some second-hand shops were located both here and in the prestigious Rialto where rents were very high.
But the Register of the Second-hand Dealers' Guild shows that it catered for everyone, from the poorest to the wealthiest, and was described by one contemporary as a "Most noble trade". Buyers and sellers operated throughout the city: in shops, in the streets, in taverns, buying from individuals and at auction. Goods ranged from rags to fine cloth of gold and silver. Damaged items were repaired and resold at higher prices.
Other evidence for the second hand trade comes from inventories and from government records; a few pawn tickets from the Jewish ghetto have also survived.
Deciphering these texts proved difficult. Patricia was alarmed to discover that the Register of the Guild of Second-hand Dealers was handwritten by lots of different people. There were linguistic barriers in analysing bureaucratic documents and translating the Venetian dialect. Each organisation had its own vocabulary so it was like having to learn a new language each time with each type of document.
Thinking History 
Renaissance Venice was astonishingly good at PR - the city sold itself as a place of unique harmony, freedom and prosperity, specially favoured by God.
Should we take the Venetian publicists at their own estimation? How did the ordinary man or woman in the street manage on a day-to-day basis? Given the gulf that existed between the poor who pledged their children against loans and the rich who carried a fortune in clothes on their backs, how did society hold together? What was the social cement? We present here evidence and invite you use them as a starting point in thinking about possible answers to these problems. There is difficulty in knowing anything about the poor and illiterate, those who lived on the margins of society, for they were powerless to tell their own story; it was the literate elite who recorded what was inevitably a partial and prejudiced account of the lives of the poor.
Q. How can we find out about the lives of marginals in early modern Venice?
Thinking History
We can calculate how crowded the city was and from that make deductions about living conditions. The programme also shows us documentation of poverty in the form of records of debt such as pawnbroking loans and the activities of second-hand dealers. But we only see the poor when they are in trouble - borrowing money, receiving charity or when they come up against the criminal law; it is only then they get into the records. Exceptionally, in times of major crisis, the authorities did a census of the poor, largely so that they could forestall violent protest, but generally we do not know how large this underclass was or the extent to which individuals slipped in and out of destitution. Were the poor in Venice any worse off than those in other towns? What problems are there likely to be in trying to find comparative evidence to tackle this problem?
If you are interested in the problems of recapturing the experience of the poor, the OU course A103 An Introduction to the Humanities looks at this question.
Content last updated: 29/03/2005
