ABSTRACT
This chapter unpacks three spatial registers of spatial representations, of spatial scale and relational space, and the lived space of sociality, to suggest how different spaces shape activities and our accounts of them. The social and the symbolic geographies of cities were linked. The Venetian symbolic landscape was animated and sustained by numerous rituals such as the Doges annual Marriage to the Sea, or the Ascension Day processions in the Piazza San Marco. The great spaces built for balls and celebrations at European courts in the seventeenth century made possible better-lit evening gatherings and shifted key social events from the street to the court and from day to night. Thus, just as the juridical space of the city might be porous and fragmented so too was its symbolic registry where competing and conflicting codings clashed from church, commercial and civic liturgies to the sign systems of the aristocracy.
