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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 26 October 2023
Abstract
This chapter considers the Mercerie as an identity marker in early modern Venice, helping shape its perception as a luxurious city and a powerful commercial marketplace. The concentration of shops around Rialto and the urban route from Rialto to St Mark’s redefined itself between the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries as the center of a clearly configured mercantile space. Albeit coexisting with several other crafts, the mercers dominated trade in this area. Their rich and often international clientele requested luxury items characterizing Venetian production, while the shops increasingly contributed to direct local production. Making use of contemporary guides, archival sources, and the existing bibliography, this case study of Venetian Mercerie stresses the importance of an urban route in shaping the identity of an early modern economy and society.
Keywords: Republic of Venice; Mercerie; early modern retailing; Venetian manufactures
And if a stranger know not the way, hee shall not need aske it, for if hee will follow the presse of people, hee shall be sure to bee brought to the place of Saint Marke, or that of Rialto.
Located in the heart of Venice, in its oldest and most significant part, the itinerary called Mercerie links Rialto, across the famous bridge, to Piazza San Marco (fig. 4.1). It stands in the foundational area of the city, still characterized by a dense presence of shops, warehouses, and landing points for transport boats on both edges of the route—the lagoon at San Marco on one side, and the Grand Canal on the other. From time immemorial, and still today (in a radically different era), this area—the route of the Mercerie and its equally dense branches full of shops—represents the quintessence of the city’s mercantile vocation and coincides with its identity.
The street properly defined as Merceria starts from Piazza San Marco through the arch of the Torre dell’Orologio, from which this part of the street takes its name (fig. 4.2); it then proceeds past the parish church of San Zulian, crosses the wide bridge of the Bareteri (the sellers of woolen caps), touches the apse of the convent church of San Salvador, and ends in Campo di San Bartolomeo, close to the church of the same name and at the foot of the Rialto bridge (see Ill. 1).
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