‘Tuning in’ to the soundscape

Put yourself on one of the street-corners of cinquecento Florence.Footnote ¹ You are a couple of blocks north-east of the Cathedral, standing at the Canto alla Catena, at the intersection of present-day via Alfani and via della Pergola. The Orbatello precinct, which takes up most of a city block, spreads out before you. The buildings look almost as they will in five hundred years, but the acoustic environment is far more foreign to your twenty-first-century ears. As you tune into your surroundings, the first difference you can distinguish is the absence of the hoarse racket of motorini (scooters) spluttering up and down the cobblestones; then the lack of other automotive traffic noise and mobile phone conversations. Without these key-note sounds, such hallmarks of modern-day Florence, your sense of the space around you is perceptibly altered.Footnote ² As you listen even more intently to the neighbourhood and city around you, you realize that it is not only the difference in these foreground noises that contributes to the unfamiliar feeling of the place. Without the masking effect of the usual constant background hum of a modern industrialized city, you can make out smaller and more distant details in the ambient soundscape. Your ears are thus able to register a greater field of acoustic information, and you are connected by your senses to a wider area of the city about you.

That is not to say that in the absence of high levels of constant ambient noise the Orbatello was at all a quiet place five hundred years ago. From Giuseppe Richa, we learn that this enclosed complex of buildings included a church and three rows of some 30 houses, which were further subdivided into apartments.Footnote ³ Inside the walls, the paved streets between each of the rows of houses were narrow, and the houses on either side rose steeply for two storeys. Sound would have reflected easily off all the hard surfaces and reverberated along these corridors of stone. During the first half of the sixteenth century, over one hundred people were housed in close proximity in the Orbatello. In his article, ‘A widow's asylum of the Renaissance: the Orbatello of Florence’, Richard Trexler estimates that there were on average around nine people to each two-level house.Footnote ⁴ The nearby sounds of daily life lived in such close quarters would have travelled easily from dwelling to dwelling, around corners and through windows that were rarely glassed. In this way, actual proximity and building materials could conspire to heighten the sensory awareness that there was always someone who was close by and listening, a perception which has obvious implications for understanding an early modern sense of ‘private’ space. In place of glass, it was usually paper or linen – soaked so as to be made translucent – that was stretched across window frames, creating the membrane-like effect of finestre impannate.Footnote ⁵ The ease with which waves of sound from one house could come floating and mingle with those of another through these permeable thresholds is indeed a salient metaphor for the inter-connectedness of daily life during this period. Similarly, while the Orbatello was officially a sequestered community, with access to the outside world restricted in order to preserve the sexual honour of its inhabitants, in practice the seclusion was far from absolute. As Natalie Tomas and Sharon T. Strocchia have suggested in the case of the nunneries and households of Renaissance Florence, there could be many channels of communication and exchange between a nominally cloistered community and the wider society outside its gates.Footnote ⁶ Using sound as a category of analysis leads one towards considering the Orbatello in terms of this embededdness and permeability, and away from a more narrow idea of it as a discrete object in isolation from the neighbourhood and the world beyond it.

The Orbatello itself is thus as much a character in the following tale as any of the human protagonists, as it did much more than merely provide a material setting. The principal base of direct evidence for this tale is fragmentary and elusive, coming as it does from just two court documents among the millions that exist in the vast archives of late Renaissance Florence.Footnote ⁷ From these fragments it is possible to piece together a particularly vivid episode in the sonic history of Florence; a vignette about a young man who was punished by the authorities in charge of the Orbatello, for having used threatening noises and derogatory songs as a means of crossing its forbidden threshold. One of the documents is the transcription of the interrogation of the youth, a secondhand account of his deeds as he narrated them to the investigator through a slot in the prison walls. The other is the subsequent report to Duke Cosimo I of the details of the case and the punishment ordered by the magistrate. Other historians of early modern ritual have considered such cases as part of wider patterns of noise and affront, normative scorning behaviours and youthful rites of disorder.Footnote ⁸ Rather than attempting another such survey, this article instead concentrates on the story of a single incident. By doing so, this article adds a depth of detail and specificity to previous studies of early modern ritual insult, and engages the assumption common to all case-studies: that it is possible to discern an ingrained local logic or sensibility underpinning even the most minor historical events. The listening habits of sixteenth-century Florentines, their sensitivities to place and conventions of gender, honour, noise and locality were all factors at play in the story of sonic abuse that emerges from these records in the Parte Guelfa archive. The opportunity, then, offered by this episode is to understand the workings of aurality, spatiality and insult as they were borne out in a fleeting moment of everyday life in late Renaissance Florence. By its form, this article also draws attention to the epistemological position of the historian as a story-teller; it alludes to the power of narratives to mould the ways in which historical subjects account for their behaviour, just as an historian's attempt to make sense of these past lives is likewise shaped by an imperative to render a coherent form.

The Orbatello and the Parte Guelfa

The Orbatello was endowed by Messer Niccolò di Jacobo degli Alberti in 1372, and was specifically intended by its founder to be used as a charitable shelter for poor women and girls of good virtue. The gate thus still bears the Alberti coat of arms, and the nearby Canto alla Catena was named for the chains or fetters that feature in the design. The Orbatello maintained its intended role as a house of public charity for much of its subsequent history. In the latter half of the sixteenth century, along with the widows it also sheltered orphans from the nearby foundling hospital of the Innocenti, and was used from 1704 as a home for unmarried mothers, and then a hospital for syphilitic women and prostitutes.Footnote ⁹ As it stands today, the small church within the complex is now the library of the Art History department of the University of Florence, and the former widows’ residences now house a dermatology clinic.

When the Alberti were exiled from Florence and their property confiscated, the home for widows then passed to the administrative control of the Captains of the Parte Guelfa, in accordance with the customary practice for the estates of rebels, exiles and enemies of the government.Footnote ¹⁰ The Parte was a powerful bastion within the political structure of late Renaissance Florence, an administrative body that traditionally tended to align with the more aristocratic elements of Florentine society.Footnote ¹¹ This noble sensibility was reflected in the emphasis that the Guelf magistracy placed on the aristocratic notion of honour, a preoccupation that becomes evident in the extant records of their dealings with the Orbatello. From the point of view of the Parte, the purpose of the Orbatello was not only to provide a charitable shelter to poor widows, but also to protect the virginal honour of their daughters, with the ultimate aim of making a respectable marriage for them. The institutional focus on public charity and public honour was borne out not only in the regulations governing the Orbatello, but also in the petitions the Parte received from widows requesting a place in the residences. In order to convince the Parte that their applications were worthy of consideration, these petitioners frequently cited the need to shelter their children from the moral dangers that their poverty might otherwise lead them into.Footnote ¹² The Captains of the Parte operated as a civil and criminal magistracy, dealing with those who had contravened the various edicts and regulations set down in order to control the widows’ space, and they also employed the prior of the Orbatello to be the ears of the Parte within the community there. Under the terms of his office, in addition to his salary and a house and market garden, the priest was specifically paid to supervise the opening and closing of the gate, and thus effectively responsible for the cloistering of the women of the Orbatello.Footnote ¹³ It was he who regularly reported to the Captains, assessing the moral character of any applicants, and reporting on any scandals or incidents that occurred there.Footnote ¹⁴

Whispers of scandal

The physical parameters of the Orbatello landscape shaped the perceptual experience of its spaces – the qualities of ambient noise and reverberation, for instance, directly affected the awareness of the space and spaciousness around the listener. Properties such as the thickness of the walls and the thinness of the windows are therefore important not only in establishing the acoustics of the Orbatello, but also in exploring its social life. Equally important, moreover, are particular place-meanings and associations that clustered around the site at various points in its history. Among the collective memories, stories and local lore that Orbatello would have evoked for sixteenth-century Florentines were certain whispers of scandal that hung faintly about its walls. As the following story of the rise and fall of Piero d'Alessandro will tell, one cannot consider the ways in which these walls themselves both set apart and connected the inhabitants with the wider community, without noting both their physical and social dimensions.

Trexler cites the first of several incidents in which Florentines demonstrated an association between the Orbatello and rumours of sexual impurity and describes how ‘a crowd of Ciompi in revolt attacked the place and its allegedly “whoring” inhabitants’ in 1378.Footnote ¹⁵ The Parte Guelfa was at pains to dispel such an immodest reputation, and moved to do so on numerous occasions during the course of the institution's history.Footnote ¹⁶ Between the years 1552 and 1554, for instance, the capitani dealt with several scandals involving the widows and girls of the Orbatello.Footnote ¹⁷ There were three such incidents in 1553 alone which make an appearance in the suppliche received by the Parte for that year, scandals that threatened the good order of the Orbatello and dragged its name ‘into the bordello’.Footnote ¹⁸ In the following January of 1554 the problems evidently continued, with allegations of adultery and impropriety as well as reports of young men entering the Orbatello, among them some bearing arms and another named by the priest as ‘quello dello scorbacchia’ (he of the scorning/insult).Footnote ¹⁹ The priest, in a report to the Parte, goes so far as to list six young men in particular, and ‘many others whose name I [Antonio da Vertine, the priest of Orbatello] do not know’, and also the names of the girls of the Orbatello that seemed to him to be the ones that were encouraging these troublemakers.Footnote ²⁰ When in 1585 further scandals involving the women of Orbatello emerged, the administration moved to place the most elderly and venerable widows in the rooms adjoining the entrance gate, in effect using them as an anthropomorphous moral buffer in order to protect the sexual reputation of the institution.Footnote ²¹ The reputation of the Orbatello was thus the subject of constant vigilance on the part of the capitani, and the breach of the physical thresholds of the Orbatello is equated in all of these incidents with an affront to the honour of the house itself. As each new scandal followed the last, rumours, whispers and layers of association built up in popular memory, echoing around the gate of the Orbatello over several generations. These scandals are thus fundamental to any understanding of the ideas of ‘place’, ‘threshold’ and ‘honour’ in the early modern neighbourhood, of how these ideas took on physical form in the city landscape, and consequently of the trespass or breach of such ideas-in-space. Standing on that sixteenth-century street corner thus absorbing and ‘tuning in’ to these factors in the environment around you, notice then the arrival of one Piero d'Alessandro, known by the alias El Faccenda (Mr Busy), as he comes strolling towards the Orbatello. But look, here he comes. Listen to him.Footnote ²²

Piero and Cecia

This is the tale of that Piero, a serial flirt who was punished for making a noisy, lewd nuisance of himself in and around the Orbatello in 1553. The Orbatello building at this time still mainly housed respectable widows, and their dependants, who had fallen on hard times. Indeed, it would seem that it was the daughter of one such widow who was the object of Piero's amorous, and conspicuous, attentions. In breach of an edictFootnote ²³ forbidding males over 12 years of age from entering the premises, Piero would come a-wooing ‘once or twice a week’.Footnote ²⁴ According to his testimony Piero was a legitimate suitor, and he had looked upon the girl Cecia with the intention to ‘take her for wife’. While the Parte usually offered no assistance for the widows of Orbatello to remarry, it did provide some dowry to their unmarried daughters, which although not overly generous was usually relatively respectable.Footnote ²⁵

When Piero talked with Cecia's mother, however, she told him ‘almost as if she was ashamed to say it’ that she only had sixteen scudi to contribute to Cecia's dowry.Footnote ²⁶ Even with the Parte's contribution, that would make it quite a small dowry indeed. With a certain sense of expediency, Piero summed up the dilemma thus: ‘if she is poor and I am poor we don't go well together’.Footnote ²⁷ This pragmatism does not necessarily indicate a lack of sentiment; instead it reflects the realities of the Florentine dowry market, which imposed real considerations of a practical nature on a potential match between a servant and the daughter of a poor widow. As Gene Brucker remarks, ‘In Renaissance Florence and in Europe generally, the sentiment of love and the institution of marriage were rarely combined into the felicitous state that later became the Western ideal.’Footnote ²⁸

At this point, so Piero's story goes, he put Cecia out of his head, and no longer had any intentions of marrying her. And yet, he was ‘in every way like a young man’ and kept returning to the Orbatello.Footnote ²⁹ For young Florentine males of this period, flirting and the ‘pursuit of women was a common pastime’.Footnote ³⁰ The figure of a male suitor lingering in wait for the object of his desires and promenading in front of her house is a familiar character in novelle and Carnival songs and other literary representations of flirting and seduction. This archetypal behaviour also appears in the real-life histories of lovers such as Giovanni and Lusanna, or Fabrizio Bracciolini and his beloved Chiara in Donald Weinstein's The Captain's Concubine. Footnote ³¹ In these and other examples, the suitor is far from a shy, silent presence lurking in the shadow of his beloved. In this case, as well as making other sounds that are mentioned in the reports, it was alleged that the garrulous Piero used to ‘chat’ first with this woman and then with that. The actual word used is ‘gracchiare’, which literally means to croak like a frog or a crow, but is also used to mean to chatter or to speak meaningless words. ‘Gracchiare’ also has overtones of flirting as well as chatting, by the widespread association between the sound of the call of a crow and the Latin word for tomorrow, ‘cras’. Lina Bolzoni, for instance, finds this tradition of association between the crow and ‘the maiden who coyly withholds her favours’ in sixteenth-century Neapolitan poetry.Footnote ³²

The local soundscape

Even without the car noises and industrialized hubbub of the present-day city, the sounds that Piero made still had plenty of noise against which to compete. The widows and children of the Orbatello would have shared the daily experience of living in the midst of a particular soundscape; the familiar cycle of liturgical hours tolling from churches and convents in the immediate vicinity; the small chimes attached to the vestments of priests on their way to those dying in Santa Maria Nuova; the calls of the water-bearers, porters, peddlers and the watch; the sounds of the workday beginning and ending at several nearby wool-drying workshops; the rhythmical passage of human and animal feet on the cobbles; and from both the Orbatello and the adjacent foundlings’ home of the Innocenti, the ringing sounds of childish games and songs which had so irritated an earlier verse-writer.Footnote ³³

The city's omnipresent bells would toll not only to mark the passage of time and to proclaim important events but these sounds were also given more symbolic functions: to ward off evil, to protect the city from storms and plague and to call the citizens to meet or to arms. Attuned as it was to this language of bells, the Florentine ear was also extremely adept at discerning its merest subtleties; able, for instance, to detect in the desultory ringing of the palazzo bells after a papal victory in 1523 a more lukewarm political response to that represented by the comparatively enthusiastic peals coming from the Cathedral.Footnote ³⁴ All the important bells of the city were given official baptisms, and many were referred to popularly by familiar nicknames, indicating a highly developed ability to distinguish between each bell. Specifically local meanings for certain bells were also possible, as when a parish bell sounded to remind fellow confraternity members in the vicinity to pray for the soul of one of their departed brothers. There is not room here to explore fully the rich systems of urban communication based around the bell-tower; but their very sophistication is indicative of just how critical the sense of hearing was to the early modern urbanite.Footnote ³⁵ The bell-toll is a cardinal example of how the sixteenth-century soundscape could furnish many points of reference by which Florentines like Piero and Cecia might navigate through the spaces and social politics of their city.

The air of the city around the Orbatello was thus laden with acoustic signals that both connected the widows with the wider city at their gate and also defined the character of their particularly local sphere within it. Nearby, for instance, was the Santissima Annunziata, a large and important church whose bells would have broadcast a significant sonic presence across the neighbourhood. Moreover, its prominence in the public landscape of Florence was not only due to its visual impact, but was also a perceptual impression of heard and felt dimensions. The piazza of the church was continually re-fashioned as an important site in the festive life and civic identity of Florence by the many processions that called there. Without ever catching sight of the marchers, the residents of the Orbatello could hear the sound of shouts, trumpets, marching feet, the woodwind shawms and fifes (pifferi) and drums as they wound their way around their customary routes through the city, linking this nearby piazza with other prominent landmarks: the Duomo, the Piazza della Signoria, the church of the Orsanmichele, and other points of festive reference in the processional landscape. Indeed, listening was one of the best ways for Florentines to get their bearings amidst the blind corners and crowded streets of the densely packed city centre, as it was possible to hear much farther than one could see. Even today, after successive generations of urban renewal have cleared swathes through the medieval jumble, the lack of long vistas in the landscape of the historic centre still encourages reliance on the ears as practical means of orientation. As the martial beat of parade drums faded or renewed, early modern listeners could track not only the progress of the procession across the city from one soundmark to another, but could interpret in this pattern a sonic representation of the city as a whole; a map made of sound which wove the local orbit of the Orbatello into a spatial perception of a unified Florence.

The ears of the neighbourhood

Given the sophisticated listening habits of Florentines, and when set against the particular acoustic space of Orbatello, Piero's speech acts were especially loaded and provocative. Piero's flirtatious conversation would have been a major element in the street soundscape and all the more noticeable for being a ‘sound-out-of-place’ in an environment that ostensibly excluded adult male voices.Footnote ³⁶ Even everyday conversations in the communal spaces of the neighbourhoods of Renaissance Florence were highly conspicuous, and there are countless incidents of shouts, cries and rumori on the street rousing the populace on to the streets. As Bruce Smith has argued for sixteenth-century London, given the usual densities of construction in the typical urban acoustic, the sound of speech at a normal conversational level would have been discernible at a distance of up to about one hundred feet:

Furthermore, not only was outdoor conversation a very public act in terms of its relative audibility, but it was also routinely subject to a high level of community scrutiny. The extensive networks of local rumour and neighbourhood gossip in the early modern city were such that ‘Neighbours were expected to know each other's habits and their opinion was sought when, for example, considering marriage’ and bishops could expect community members to be able to denounce any of the blasphemous speech habits of their fellow parishioners.Footnote ³⁸ Piero himself said that he consulted with one of Cecia's neighbours, Mona Pasqua, as part of his enquiries about a possible marriage, and the most common means for the successive priests of the Orbatello to investigate the moral quality of an applicant was to inquire amongst that woman's neighbours.Footnote ³⁹ In early Renaissance Italian courts, according to Laura Ikins Stern, what was common knowledge circulating around the neighbourhood constituted the legally acceptable proof of ‘public fame’.Footnote ⁴⁰ Similarly, in his Libri della Famiglia, Alberti describes the operation of public opinion and personal reputation: ‘Fame is not born in the midst of private peace but in public action. Glory springs up in public squares; reputation is nourished by the voice and judgement of many persons of honor, and in the midst of the people.’Footnote ⁴¹ On many levels, therefore, this was a culture that was very attuned to gossip; alive to what was said in the public squares, and what was heard to be said in the markets and other meeting places. Neighbours not only closely watched each other but they also listened; in many ways the walls of early modern Florence truly did ‘have ears’.Footnote ⁴² It is safe, then, to assume that Piero was aware that he would be easily heard and noticed throughout the common acoustic space of the neighbourhood. At the very least, Piero certainly flaunted a reckless indifference to being detected, and he was particularly scornful of any threats of being taken away and punished for his presence. In his subsequent behaviour, moreover, he actively called on this audience of listeners; demonstrating not merely an awareness of the ears of the neighbourhood turned towards him but in fact directly ‘playing to the crowd’.

‘Hu, hu, hu, hu’

Piero's habitual visits may never have come to the notice of the Captains of the Parte Guelfa had he not been confronted inside the walls by two girls of the Orbatello, who warned him that the bargello (chief of police) would not look favourably on his presence there.Footnote ⁴³ Driven farther off by this threat, Piero stood in the gateway of Orbatello and taunted the two fanciulle (girls) with a noise that was written as ‘hu hu hu hu’. A para-linguistic insult was thus transcribed and preserved in ink, leaving the historian of aural culture with a tantalizing series of questions. What precisely had the investigator of the Parte heard? Given what we know of the local variations of pronunciation and conventions of spelling, the ‘h’ would almost certainly have been aspirated.Footnote ⁴⁴ In reconstructing this noise, could it thus be rendered as an owlish hoot, a sexually aggressive grunt or perhaps a satirical howl of despair? On one hand, similar notation in sixteenth-century play-texts has been used to indicate weeping (uh, uh, uh, uh).Footnote ⁴⁵ On the other, there is a significant cluster of word-associations in Italian between the sound of a bird hooting or coo-ing and seduction and cuckoldry. ‘Civetta’ is the term for a little owl, a bird that was traditionally used by hunters and falconers to lure and entice other birds. By extension, the word came to refer to a flirtatious or coquettish woman. Several Carnival songs deal with the themes of sexual aggression, mockery and owl symbols.Footnote ⁴⁶ A connection also exists between courting and the sound of a dove or turtle dove coo-ing, in the verb tubare. ‘Tubare’ derives from the Latin verb tutubare, which itself actually refers to the call not of a dove but of an owl. In Giovanni Maria Cecchi's play L'Assiuolo (1549), the horned owl of the title refers to the old husband, cuckolded and humiliated, who is tricked into a locked courtyard to there spend the night repeating his plaintive password: an owl hoot.Footnote ⁴⁷ Given the heavy symbolism associated with the call of an owl, it is certainly tempting to speculate that Piero was deliberately imitating an owl or dove. However, a search for bird noises in contemporary literature has thus far only found an owl call transcribed as chiù. Footnote ⁴⁸

It is indeed possible that Piero was thus making a sardonic aural pun on an owl hoot. My inclination, however, given Piero's youth and his other behaviour during this incident, is to attribute far more menace and sexual aggression to this noise than could be suggested by either a sarcastic owl hoot or satirical sob. Piero's ‘hu hu hu hu’ would be equivalent in meaning to a scorn; a menacing sexualized grunt, designed to ridicule and intimidate the girls who had dared to cross the threshold of the Orbatello and chase him back into the street. Young men who colonized public spaces, asserting their presence with mocking noises and molesting women were an all-too-familiar thorn in the side of the Florentine authorities: to judge for instance from the capitani's stern censure of the wool workers who sat around a column in the Old Market and facevano le baie (would make the insolent taunts, noisy hooting and pranks known as baie) at the poor women who sold fruit and vegetables there.Footnote ⁴⁹ This taunting ‘baying’ (the word derives from the verb abbaiare, to bark or bay) which was ‘typical’ of young men like Piero can be heard repeatedly in cinquecento Florence.Footnote ⁵⁰ It was the raw, vocal expression of the same impulse to dominate symbolically space, through sound, that lead to other noisy forms of youthful disorder and ritual disruption, such as the custom of early morning clamour and din with which groups of youths invaded the churches during Holy Week.Footnote ⁵¹ As the representation of sounds heard, the transcription is thus a kind of recording; the pen marks allow us to listen (albeit faintly and imprecisely) to the raw noises themselves that were used as a type of ritual weaponry in a symbolic battle for early modern urban space.Footnote ⁵²

Scornful serenades

After having delivered his ‘hu hu hu hu’ from the gate of Orbatello, Piero only removed himself as far as the next corner. The two girls tentatively followed him to the gate (most probably to check whether he had indeed gone), at which point he came back towards them, and they again drew back within the Orbatello while he walked up and down outside it.Footnote ⁵³ It was during the course of these movements that Piero says that he discovered that he had a rival, another youth who was also courting the girl Cecia. The street drama in front of the Orbatello then shifted into a scene of confrontation between the two suitors; as threats, insults, grunts and heated words were traded between the two. Such a confrontation between rivals in love is commonplace in the novelle, songs and folklore of the period.Footnote ⁵⁴ The way these are recorded suggests a fairly formulaic exchange; the insult ‘tanto haves tu fiato’ trails off half-finished, as if they followed such a familiar script that either in the enactment or the recording the audience in each case would easily be able to fill in the remainder from the brief prompting of a few words. As Peter Burke comments:

And indeed, such a progression from angry words to disrespectful songs was exactly what followed in Piero's narrative.

The documents in the Parte Guelfa archive record that Piero admitted to passing by and singing at night-time in the street outside Orbatello, substituting disparaging terms for ‘old woman’ into popular rhymes.Footnote ⁵⁶ The custom of inserting personalized insults into easily recognizable folk tunes was a common practice, particularly during Carnival.Footnote ⁵⁷ Moreover, one of the other songs which Piero sung – Queste vecchie grinze e nere or The Ballad of the Envious Old Women – derided old women for being envious, gossipy old hags who were the spiteful guardians of a pretty young woman.Footnote ⁵⁸ It was one of many popular ballads and sonnets which dealt with the motif of the widow as an ugly figure, a target of derision and antagonism.Footnote ⁵⁹ By singing these abusive songs outside the Orbatello, Piero was playing on wider anxieties about the widows and using a common strategy for belittling them.Footnote ⁶⁰ The Orbatello was a matriarchal enclave; despite the masculine discipline imposed externally by the Parte, it was also a ‘house whose matrons took in mother-led families, preserving these family segments and creating new solidarities . . . a house for women run largely by the women themselves’.Footnote ⁶¹ The songs that Piero sung were thus a hostile sonic attack designed to define the Orbatello in opposition to social norms, and to invoke existing misgivings about the reputation of the house. By listening to the historical soundscape around them, and placing these songs and insults within it, we can imagine the unit of ‘neighbourhood’ as one not bounded by the strict administrative lines of parish boundary or held together by geographic proximity but instead as one that encompasses those within earshot; those who could hear and understand the implications of an insult hurled through the threshold of the Orbatello.

The trespass, therefore, was not only upon the forbidden space of the Orbatello, but in pointedly making sounds in and around it Piero also committed an act of sonic trespass and attack on the honour of the house. Songs and noises, often raucous or scornful, outside the house of an enemy or person one wished to insult were a common strategy in early modern European cities. Ritual ridicule of this nature ranged from the practice of charivari (the French term for a noisy shaming ritual usually directed at socially unacceptable newlyweds) to many instances of scampanata, rough music, mattinata and other less specific uproar and racket in the streets.Footnote ⁶² These insults were frequently directed towards the sexual honour, or supposed infidelity, of the occupants and at times the sonic injury was increased by the depiction of cuckold's horns on the windows and doors of the house.Footnote ⁶³ Piero was clearly adapting and improvising upon the conventions of several related genres of ritual behaviour, revealing them to be not strict, discrete forms but instead expressive opportunities for a local social politics of sound.Footnote ⁶⁴ Piero's actions, therefore, were part of a wider set of behaviours that were commonly enacted in the course of relations between neighbours, friends and enemies. His baie demonstrate the highly contentious nature of urban space, and some of the sonic strategies available to early modern city-dwellers by which they could contest it.

House-scorning

In particular, Piero's actions bear many of the hallmarks of what Elizabeth S. Cohen calls ‘house-scorning’ in her essay ‘Honor and gender in the streets of early modern Rome’, which she defines thus:

In comparing this to the facts of our incident, it is easy to cast Piero in the role of the ‘lustful young man whose amorous ambitions have been thwarted’ who, according to Cohen, ‘was a common perpetrator of house-scornings’.Footnote ⁶⁶ Cohen has found several examples of this genre of behaviour in the records of the criminal courts of late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century Rome. By directing an attack on a house, the house-scorners sought to cast shame loudly on the sexual reputation of their enemies’ families. The focus of their ruckus was often a door or window in the family home, leading Cohen to conclude that these were symbolically vulnerable points, thresholds between ‘male’ public space and ‘female’ private space and thus fraught with sexual meaning.Footnote ⁶⁷ In this reading of these thresholds she is joined by other historians of gender such as Elizabeth Horodowich, who argues for the existence of a contemporary discourse that equated a woman's (closed) mouth with chastity and the threshold of the house (and the need to regulate female behaviour in regard to all three aspects).Footnote ⁶⁸ It is at this point that one is reminded of the heretofore peripheral figure of Cecia, presumed to be silently listening to the racket from her window.

While not all of Cohen's conclusions about house-scorning in Rome can be transposed to cinquecento Florence, there is still a discernibly similar logic at work at the gate of the Orbatello.Footnote ⁶⁹ Piero called on the listening ears of the neighbourhood to bring down scorn on the Orbatello, and he directed his sonic attacks at a point of symbolic vulnerability: the threshold. Of course, in many of the Roman cases the scorning involved more than one incidence of noisemaking over time, and these conflicts often escalated to the point where a physical assault was made upon the building, with insulting symbols and ‘disreputable things painted’ on the façade of the recipient's house.Footnote ⁷⁰ There is no surviving evidence that Piero did this, nor that he even went as far as some of Cohen's house-scorners; there was probably no excrement smeared on the doors of Orbatello, for instance. However, there are several tantalizing indications of a more serious wrongdoing by Piero, such as when the interrogator wrote that Piero confessed ‘only’ to have gone into Orbatello, and made his baie there, but without any further immorality ‘as is more widely alleged in the attached document’.Footnote ⁷¹ The accusation of further dishonestà seems to have been a charge of blasphemy, obscenely revealing himself and other disrespectful gestures, but is denied by Piero several times in his testimony. I have inferred here that this would be what Piero was also accused of, because he is at pains to stress that he had ‘never used an immoral word nor any indecent act neither with the opening to my breeches nor with my eyes nor otherwise, but always [behaved] decently like an honourable young man who courted a maiden’.Footnote ⁷² In the absence of any additional evidence to prove this more serious crime, and in order to make an example of Piero, the magistracy sentenced him to be given one and up to two shakes on the end of the rope, but ‘gently’, in public outside the palazzo and be then sent naked to the gate of Orbatello where he was to get dressed again.Footnote ⁷³

This story is certainly evidence that the walls of the Orbatello were constructed as social barriers just as much as they were physical boundaries; and that the liminal space of the gate and the street could be appropriated, contested and gendered through words, gestures and sounds. Whether or not Piero went as far as the missing allegation might claim, there are still ample points of comparison between the house-scorns of early modern Rome and the events of this story. The most important factor in common is a strikingly similar notion of place. Piero did not attack Cecia but instead directed his hostilities toward her ‘house’ and by extension her kin or community by making his scorns outside the gate of Orbatello, the very same spot he was sent to for his ritual humiliation. The most obvious other contemporary example of this sort of attitude in operation is the custom of making vendetta on the very location where the original affront occurred. In all these instances, place was experienced as a container of emotion and group honour, and could be made to stand in the stead of a person in receiving an insult or slight. Just as much as by bricked walls, an enclosure within the cityscape of Florence was constructed with notions of honour and reputation, conventions of insult and spatial politics of gender and class. In launching baie, scornful serenades and other discourtesies at the clausura of the Orbatello, Piero was not only challenging his physical exclusion from the place but also sounding out the more intangible layers of meaning built into the boundaries of the widows’ home.