Melissa
Calaresu (History, Cambridge)
Food selling and urban space in eighteenth-century Italy
Visual evidence of selling food in eighteenth-century Italy is as rich as that for Britain and France, although it rarely appears in studies of street cries from this period. The engravings of Venetian street-sellers by Gaetano Zompini, the paintings and engravings of Neapolitan street life by Pietro Fabris, as well as the countless images of lemon-sellers and fish markets by Grand Tour artists such as David Allan provide rich material for the study of the representational traditions of the costumes and customs of urban inhabitants in early modern Italy, dating from Vecellio, Brambilla and Carracci at the end of the sixteenth century. While my recent research has focused on the production of images of street-sellers for Italian city elites and Grand Tourists in the eighteenth century, the complex reconstruction of these representational traditions should not belie the ethnographic value of these depictions of street life.
Shops continue to dominate the history of buying in this period but, of course, most inhabitants of cities in early modern Europe continued to buy their food on the street – either in markets or from food hawkers – and this was certainly the case in the Italian peninsula into the nineteenth century. This paper will begin to sketch a geography of selling food on the streets of eighteenth-century Naples, with some comparison to the cities of Venice and Rome, by placing the images of food hawkers alongside contemporary travel accounts, maps, and tax records, and, in this way, contribute not only to a better understanding of the variety of use of urban space in Naples in this period – the selling of food on the streets intersects with other kinds of selling – of songs, puppet shows, and other popular entertainments – but, in turn, to a wider historiography about the function of urban space in the formation of the public sphere in southern Europe.
Melissa Calaresu is a lecturer in history at Gonville and Caius College. She is writing a cultural history of the Neapolitan enlightenment which has grown out of earlier interests in the political thought of late eighteenth-century Naples and has combined this with newer interests on the material culture and material interests of the European enlightenment. Her recent research includes the history of ice and ice-cream in eighteenth-century Italy which explores some of the recent paradigms of enlightenment historiography, and this, in turn, has led to research on the representation and realities of food hawkers in early modern Europe. She has written articles on historical and autobiographical writing in the eighteenth century, the Grand Tour, the representation of urban space in the early modern period, and on the public sphere and political reform in Naples. She is currently editing a book (with Filippo de Vivo and Joan-Pau Rubiés), entitled Exploring cultural history: Essays in honour of Peter Burke (forthcoming Ashgate 2010).
