People and goods from across the globe filled the vibrant ports of
Genoa and Venice during the Renaissance. This book takes us onto
the streets, bridges, and waterways of these significant, sensuous
cities to reveal the ambitious schemes undertaken to promote the
cleanliness and health of their communities. Along the way, we
encounter a broad and fascinating cross-section of Renaissance
society — from courtesans to street food sellers and architects
to canal diggers — and, using new archival sources, uncover both
the ideals and lived experiences of health and environmental
management. During the Renaissance, vital connections were believed
to exist between people's natures and those of the places they
inhabited. Problems in urban or environmental bodies could have
social and moral, as well as physical, effects. Street cleaning or
the dredging of canals, therefore, were often justified in societal
and religious, as well as natural, terms. These associations shaped
government measures to regulate everyday life in ports, alongside
communal responses to natural disasters. They informed the
management of the environment, including waste disposal, flood
defences, dredging, and land reclamation, and endowed such activity
with both physical and symbolic purpose. This is not simply a story
of elite, official initiatives. Members of communities used public
health structures to resolve the challenges of urban life —
social and physical. Occupational groups such as fishermen acted as
environmental experts through the organisation of their guilds and
provided reports on specific projects and proposals to government
magistracies. Finally, the governments of both ports operated
important systems of petitions and privileges, which encouraged
innovation and the development of new technology by citizens and
foreigners to address the central, environmental challenges of the
day. Renaissance public health, then, emerges as a collaborate
enterprise, as well as a site of tension within cosmopolitan
neighbourhoods, and its study unveils more about forms of
governance and community in this period. An illuminating and
original account of social policies, urban design, and
environmental management between 1400 and 1600, Cleaning Up
Renaissance Italy provides a new, multi-disciplinary history of
Renaissance Italy.
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