Food

Guardabasso, Malanotte, and Perdelgiorno, three household servants in Pietro Aretino’s comedy The Hypocrite (1542), are – as servants are wont to be in Renaissance drama – hungry for attention, honor, and respect. But, above all, they are hungry for some food. And this is significant in the late Renaissance, for hunger itself had become a matter of immediate, daily concern. “The ‘plague of God,’ the ‘rabid hunger,’” the literary and cultural historian Piero Camporesi observes, “cannot be dated with exactitude, but from as far back at least as the second half of the sixteenth century one gets the very bitter impression that, for two centuries and a half, hunger weighed upon the whole of Italy like a terrible nightmare.” ¹ In times of famine the rank and file suffered terribly. However, it is also important to note that economic and social historians have not always seen the Italian Renaissance as a period of such hard times. Richard Goldthwaite, for instance, has argued that both skilled and unskilled workers employed in the construction industry in Florence were paid well enough to feed themselves and their families, and some could earn enough to put a substantial margin of wealth between themselves and the poverty line. Goldthwaite’s calculations suggest that workers after the Black Death (1348) were better off than before, and his conclusions, along with Brian Pullan’s calculations about the standards of living of Venetian artisans, remind us that when we use literature as evidence, it is always difficult to tell what is real and what is imaginary. ² There is hunger, which was experienced by people in the Renaissance, and, then again, there is hunger in literature, a commonplace as old as Homer’s description of Odysseus’ famished crew.