Stench in sixteenth-century Venice

An analysis of contemporary perceptions of stench is essential to understanding the increasing regulation of the urban experience in the sixteenth century. In the medical theory and natural philosophies of the time, stench was equated with disease. To look at practical measures to fight stench is therefore to examine the ability of urban authorities to cope with formidable problems of disease, sanitation, rising poverty, overcrowding and crisis migration. Anxieties ran highest in the face of the age’s great killers, infectious diseases, above all, plague. Responses were shaped as much by the increasing experience of pestilence and typhus in a milder endemic form as by the horror of devastating epidemics in Italy, Spain, Germany and the Netherlands in the first half of the sixteenth century. Venice makes a particularly important case study, since it was this city that ‘adopted the most stringent health regulations anywhere in early modern Europe’. ¹ Arguably, the Republic also established the most active and effective permanent machinery to monitor and combat stench in this period. ² Despite all this, in 1575–77, the city was stricken by a plague outbreak so terrible that over a quarter of the population perished. The Venetian example also reveals much about the limits of intervention in urban health in this period and the extent to which the threat of stench was employed to extend social controls. ³