War of the Fists

Throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Venetian workers and tradesmen would gather on a Sunday or holiday afternoon to battle with their fists or with sticks for possession of a bridge. Known as the "little battles on the bridges", these encounters enjoyed enough popularity to generate their own literature of poems, prose and etchings and were superbly chronicled over forty years by an anonymous source fortuitously discovered by the author. From these materials, and in the fashion of cultural historians such as Robert Darnton and Carlo Ginsburg, Robert Davis offers an analysis of these battles as examples of "deep play" that reveal otherwise hidden cultural traits about individual and collective honor, and the social structure of seventeenth century Venetian plebeian society. He argues that workers devoted themselves to these bloody, near archic battles as a means of reacting to the centralization of civic power and civic ritual in the hands of the aristocracy. The author's unique material enables him to offer startling evidence on a range of civic and cultural issues. He demonstrates why bridges were the obvious locations in aquatic Venice for the public display of youthful virility. He also looks at the organization of the fighting and argues that the bridge battles over time moved away from mass popular melees into organized versions of early-modern sport. The public celebrations that followed victory at the bridge also throw light on the nature and intensity of civic festival in seventeenth century Vencie. And, most interesting of all, Davis argues that the authorities' inability to control a popular event that it declared illegal over fifty times in a period of two hundered years is evidence of the chronic practical limits of state power and of elites wtihdrawing from involvement with the popular world. This novel work will be of interest to scholars and students of early modern Europe, Renaissance history, popular culture, labor history, and urban studies.