ABSTRACT
This chapter attempts to identify the city's prostitutes and defines the space of the brothel within the medieval port city. It explores the responses of contemporaries such as Frugoni about the impact of the building of the strada nuova and the relocation of the brothel into the city's Castelletto. A petition from the friars of San Francesco di Castelletto employed vivid imagery to express disgust at the anticipated impact of their new neighbours, including that of sanctity and profanity, as well as cleanliness and filth. The chapter emphasizes the connections which contemporaries, both secular and religious, drew between sin, dirt, and disease. These correspondences hold a broader significance because they provided a foundation for Renaissance conceptualizations of the relationship between people and place. Douglas Biow's 2006 monograph on The Culture of Cleanliness in Renaissance Italy established the place of dirt and cleanliness in a cross-section of Italian literature and interpreted notions of both in a broad manner.
