Drinking and sociability
Getting a drink in the pre-modern city was harder than you might think. All the licenced inns and taverns were concentrated around Rialto and San Marco . These coincided not only with the main commercial and retail areas of the city, but were also where the licenced hotels and accommodation were located, for visitors passing through. This intentional clustering of the hospitality industry ensured that the Venetian authorities could tightly regulate visitors and their social interactions in the city. Innkeepers assisted the government authorities in recording the names and provenance of their guests, while the tax revenues from the sale of wine and other services also ensured that they were closely regulated by the state. Their establishments could be large, with some of the osterie near San Marco spread over as many as four floors and thirty rooms, making them quite significant businesses.
You can find out more about these taverns in both ‘Venice Unmasked’ and ‘City of Refuge’. But what about the stable population of this crowded and hard-working city? While taverns and inns were mostly frequented by foreigners and élites, for popolani like Sebastiano, there were a number of workarounds in spite of the fact that there were no official places for them to drink.
The simplest solution appears to have been that people gathered in and around wine-sellers whose shops can be traced in the topography from street names connected to wine (vin, Malvasia) or even just the word shop (magazen). Here people would buy wine to take away, but might linger and consume it on site or in the immediate vicinity – as in some cases still occurs in Venice. There were also shops that sold cheap hot food, which often sold wine too, as there are various cases of owners being fined for doing so. Even more intriguingly, records suggest that there were a series of permitted sites for wine-merchants’ barges to moor up – known as ‘poste da vin’, or wine stations – from which they could sell directly to passers-by. A document of 1513 listed the permitted sites for five such barges in the sestiere of Dorsoduro, with a couple to be found along the Zattere, and one on the canal by San Trovaso, for example – again sites which continue to be used for such purposes.
Fabrizio Nevola
Further reading
Rosa Salzberg, ‘Little Worlds in Motion: Mobility and Space in the Osterie of Early Modern Venice’, Journal of Early Modern History, 2021, pp. 96-117
Rosa Salzberg, The Renaissance of the Road, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2023 Giuseppe Tassini, Curiosita veneziane, ovvero origini delle denominazioni stradali di Venezia, ed. Livio Moretti, Venezia : Filippi, 1970
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