Paolina's Innocence: Child Abuse in Casanova's Venice

Stanford University Press

Stanford, California

© 2012 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University.

All rights reserved.

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Printed in the United States of America on acid-free, archival-quality paper

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Wolff, Larry, author.

Paolina’s innocence : child abuse in Casanova’s Venice / Larry Wolff.

pages cm

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-8047-6261-8 (cloth : alk. paper)—ISBN 978-0-8047-6262-5 (pbk. : alk. paper)—ISBN 978-0-8047-8210-4 (e-book)

1. Franceschini, Gaetano, 1725?—Trials, litigation, etc. 2. Lozaro, Paolina, 1777—Trials, litigation, etc. 3. Trials (Child sexual abuse)—Italy—Venice—History—18th century. 4. Child sexual abuse—Investigation—Italy—Venice—History—18th century. 5. Libertinism—Italy—Venice—History—18th century. 6. Sociological jurisprudence—Italy—Venice—History—18th century. I. Title.

KKH41.F73W65 2012

2011045204—dc23

2011045204

Typeset by Bruce Lundquist in 10.5/14 Adobe Garamond

Paolina’s Innocence

CHILD ABUSE IN CASANOVA’S VENICE

Larry Wolff

STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

STANFORD, CALIFORNIA

For Sheila Klass and in memory of Mort Klass—

Always scribble, scribble, scribble! Eh, Mr. Gibbon?

Contents

Title Page

Copyright

Acknowledgments

Introduction

PART ONE THE SECRET DENUNCIATION

1. The Parish Priest

2. The Blasphemy Tribunal

3. A Stroke of Providence

4. Sexual Criminals and Young Girls

5. The Housekeeper’s Dilemma

PART TWO UPSTAIRS FROM THE COFFEEHOUSE

6. The Caffettiere in His Coffeehouse

7. Coffee and Gossip

8. Friulians in Venice

9. Inside Franceschini’s Apartment

10. The Dalmatian Widow

PART THREE THE LIBERTINE

11. The Interrogation of Franceschini

12. Casanova’s Girls

13. The Scandal of Franceschini

14. Child Pornography and the Marquis de Sade

15. The Freedom of the Libertine

PART FOUR THE INNOCENCE OF CHILDHOOD

16. Rousseau’s Simple Project

17. Paolina Lozaro in Her Own Words

18. Paolina Lozaro in the History of Childhood

19. The Chimera of Innocence

20. The Secret History of Sexual Abuse

Conclusion

Notes

Index

Acknowledgments

Although my research for many years has focused on Eastern Europe and the Habsburg monarchy, I have also maintained a strong interest in the history of childhood. I’ve taught a course on parents and children in European history and have published, over the years, articles on cultural conceptions of childhood, ranging in subject from Mme de Sévigné in the seventeenth century, to Jean-Jacques Rousseau in the eighteenth century, to Charles Dickens in the nineteenth century. In 1988 I published a book about child abuse in Freud’s Vienna, and this new book on child abuse in Casanova’s Venice is a closely related work. Each book attempts to understand abuse in a complex cultural context, which for all its complexity—in Casanova’s Venice as in Freud’s Vienna—did not include a clearly articulated sense of child abuse as a sociological phenomenon. The documentary basis for Paolina’s Innocence is an unexpectedly fat archival file of some three hundred pages, which I came upon in the Archivio di Stato in Venice when I was working on an entirely different subject, Venetian rule over the Slavs of Dalmatia in the eighteenth century (eventually published in 2001 under the title Venice and the Slavs). I found this file at the very end of one of my archival visits to Venice. I remember beginning to read it, becoming instantly fascinated with the story of Paolina Lozaro and Gaetano Franceschini, and then having to make the tough decision as to whether I should keep on reading or send the entire file to be microfilmed and, eventually, mailed to me in Boston where I then lived. I requested the microfilm and therefore had to wait quite some time to learn the details of the case.

Over the last decade, first in Boston and then in New York, I have been looking for both the necessary time and the appropriate form in which to make this material into a book. I have enjoyed the support and encouragement of colleagues at both Boston College and NYU. I am likewise exceptionally grateful for the assistance and companionship of the archivists and scholars I encountered at the Archivio di Stato in Venice, as well as the kind assistance I have received at the Biblioteca Marciana and Biblioteca del Museo Correr in Venice, and the Archivio di Stato in Vicenza. I received financial support for my research from the Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation.

I have greatly benefited from discussions of this project in particular, and the history of childhood more generally, with Maria Tatar, Paula Fass, and Tara Zahra. I have been glad to have the opportunity to discuss the early modern implications of this project with Mario Biagioli, Pierre Saint-Amand, and Andrei Zorin. I was fortunate to be able to present portions of this research at exceptionally stimulating conferences and seminars at the Princeton Cotsen Children’s Library, at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris, at the Voltaire Foundation at Oxford, and at the University of Primorska in Koper, Slovenia. My work, as presented at these conferences, then benefited further from publications under the editorship of Andrew Kahn, Claudio Povolo, and Irina Prokhorova of the New Literary Review in Moscow.

In the early stages of this project I was given enthusiastic encouragement and advice by two scholars whose thoughts I hugely valued and who died before the book was complete: Morton Klass and Stephen Jay Gould. As always, I am grateful to my parents, Bob and Renee Wolff, for their spirited interest in my research. At NYU I have to thank Stefanos Geroulanos for helping me prepare the images to accompany the text. At Stanford I am very grateful to Norris Pope, not just for publishing this book but for publishing so handsomely five books over almost twenty years, and thus personally overseeing almost my entire academic career. Finally, at home, I could not have written this book without Perri Klass, who has lived with this project for a long time and who read and edited the entire manuscript. All my thoughts about children and the history of childhood owe just about everything to her.

Introduction

In the summer of 1785 a Venetian tribunal initiated the criminal investigation of a sixty-year-old man who had been accused of having sexual contact with an eight-year-old girl. In the eighteenth century there was no clear clinical or sociological concept of child sexual abuse, as we understand it today, and the judicial investigation of this particular case kept growing in scope as the court attempted to determine what exactly had happened to the child, Paolina Lozaro, during a single night in the apartment, and the bed, of Gaetano Franceschini. She was the daughter of a poor laundress from the immigrant Friulian community in Venice; he came from a wealthy family of silk manufacturers in Vicenza. The details of the case were difficult to discover, and even more difficult to prove, for the child herself barely understood what had happened to her, but even the contested facts of the case were complicated by controversial cultural questions. The tribunal had to decide whether, and in what sense, the girl had actually been harmed; whether, and in what sense, the man’s actions were criminal; and, if so, how he should be punished. There were no simple and straightforward answers to these questions in the eighteenth century. The case began with a single-page secret denunciation to the law, composed by a neighborhood priest who had heard that Franceschini slept with the girl scandalously in his own bed.¹ The judicial dossier then accumulated testimonies of witnesses and documents of indictment and defense to the eventual length of some three hundred handwritten pages.

While it seems plausible to suppose that the mistreatment of children—what we call child abuse—was at least as common in earlier centuries as it is today, the absence of the modern concept of abuse meant that such mistreatment left relatively little documentary trace in the archival records. The three hundred–page dossier concerning the case of Gaetano Franceschini and Paolina Lozaro in 1785 may be, very possibly, the most detailed investigation of child abuse ever carried out and recorded in the world of the ancien régime. The dossier may be found in the records of the tribunal of the Esecutori contro la Bestemmia (Executors against Blasphemy), and that peculiar jurisdiction already suggests some of the difficulty in specifying and classifying the crime under consideration. Consistent with the denunciation that Franceschini kept the girl scandalously in his own bed, the principal charge against him was the very generally conceived crime of causing scandal. Paradoxically, the case did not cause scandal because it was clearly criminal but rather was deemed judicially criminal because it was the cause of neighborhood scandal. Cultural and social perspectives on childhood thus partly conditioned the legal course of the prosecution.

The first part of the book focuses on the judicial aspects of the case and examines the mandate and procedure of the Bestemmia, dealing here with a case that was entirely unrelated to issues of blasphemy. Created in the sixteenth century to appease the wrath of God, the Bestemmia by the eighteenth century, from the perspective of the European Enlightenment, already appeared as an archaic relic. Yet in this case its conventions proved unexpectedly suited to confronting incipiently modern issues of law and society.

The early modern Venetian relation to sex and the law has been explored in the pioneering research of Guido Ruggiero, especially in The Boundaries of Eros: Sex Crime and Sexuality in Renaissance Venice (1985). More recently Ruggiero, together with Edward Muir, edited a collection of articles from Quaderni storici entitled History from Crime (1994), illustrating the methodological problem of studying society through criminal cases. Essential for understanding the implications of Venetian law is the work of Gaetano Cozzi; Claudio Povolo has further elaborated the historical implications of criminal and legal issues for understanding Venetian society, and Renzo Derosas has written specifically about the Bestemmia tribunal. The purposes of the tribunal can also be comprehended in the cultural context described by Alain Cabantous in his book on the history of blasphemy in Europe (1998). Most recently, in books on early modern Venice, Joanne Ferraro has broken new ground with her work on illicit sex and infanticide (2008), and Elizabeth Horodowich has published a very relevant study on the politics of language, including blasphemy (2008).² All these works offer important insights toward understanding the prosecution of Franceschini in 1785.

The second part of the book focuses on the institution of the Venetian coffeehouse, bottega da caffè, which turned out to be central to the judicial investigation. The apartment of Franceschini, where Paolina Lozaro spent that one night in his bed, was just upstairs from a coffeehouse, which helped to make the entire building into a center of community life and neighborhood discussion. What was most characteristic of an eighteenth-century European coffeehouse, and just as stimulating as the coffee for the customers, was the level of conversational buzz and exchange of news in a public forum. Ever since the appearance in 1962 of Jürgen Habermas’s The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, the coffeehouse has been considered one of the fundamental institutions for the creation of a public sphere in eighteenth-century Europe. Coffee itself was a relatively new stimulant in Europe in the eighteenth century, and public discussion over cups of coffee seemed similarly new and equally addictive. One of the most celebrated Venetian dramas of the eighteenth century was Carlo Goldoni’s La bottega del caffè (The Coffeehouse) of 1750, in which the proprietor, or caffettiere, Ridolfo, served coffee to the neighborhood gossip Don Marzio:

DON MARZIO. Coffee.

RIDOLFO. Immediately, at your service.

DON MARZIO. What’s new, Ridolfo?³

The coffeehouse itself was something new in Venice, but the conventional query What’s new? became the prompt to public discussion of neighborhood news over cups of coffee. The Venetian tribunal of 1785, by soliciting the coffeehouse perspective on what was new in the neighborhood—including the testimony of the real-life caffettiere—was able to learn a great deal about what happened upstairs in the apartment of Gaetano Franceschini.

Danilo Reato has written a history of coffeehouses in Venice (1991), and Brian Cowan, writing about England, has explored the implications of the coffeehouse for society and community in The Social Life of Coffee (2005). James Johnson, in Venice Incognito (2011), has analyzed the meanings of Venetian masking, including the wearing of masks in coffeehouses. Because of Habermas, the historical discussion of public life in the eighteenth century has invariably made reference to coffee. The public sphere of critical discussion, theorized by Habermas, however, was certainly not identical to the culture of coffeehouse gossip dramatized by Goldoni in the eighteenth century. The case of Franceschini suggests some of the ways that coffee and gossip were related to scandal and public life, and in this regard the work of Sarah Maza on the dynamics of scandal in the causes célèbres of eighteenth-century France is also illuminating.⁴

The third part of the book confronts the figure of the man accused, the man who resided upstairs from the coffeehouse. Gaetano Franceschini lived the life of an eighteenth-century libertine, pursuing a sex life without regard to conventional moral prejudices. Libertinism was both a celebrated and excoriated way of life in the eighteenth century, and Franceschini may be considered in relation to the most famous libertine of the century, the Venetian Casanova. The litany of seductions narrated in Casanova’s memoirs suggests a question that has, perhaps, not yet been posed in the scholarly literature: How young was too young for Casanova? The answer to that question provides some clues to the meaning of Franceschini’s conduct, for Casanova and Franceschini were exact contemporaries; Casanova was born in 1725 and turned sixty in 1785, the year of Franceschini’s trial. The character of eighteenth-century libertinism may also be considered in relation to the iconic figure of Don Juan, or Don Giovanni, whose operatic incarnation was created by Mozart together with his Venetian librettist Lorenzo Da Ponte in the 1780s. The premiere of the opera in Prague took place in 1787, two years after Franceschini’s trial. With reference to Franceschini, one may pose the question of how the eighteenth-century model of libertinism encompassed what the modern world would regard as sexual psychopathology. In 1886, a century after Franceschini’s trial, the German psychiatrist Richard von Krafft-Ebing introduced the clinical category of paedophilia erotica in his Psychopathia Sexualis. The eighteenth-century world had some sense that Franceschini, with an eight-year-old girl in his bed, had done something exceptionally scandalous, but his contemporaries could not clearly articulate the exceptional deviation from the sexual norm.

The critical literature on libertinism includes major edited collections, such as Eros philosophe: Discours libertins des lumières (1984) and Libertine Enlightenment: Sex, Liberty, and License in the Eighteenth Century (2004), exploring the diverse social, philosophical, and literary aspects of the subject. Pierre Saint-Amand’s literary study of seduction in the Enlightenment appeared in Paris in 1987, translated into English as The Libertine’s Progress in 1994. More recent monographs include Le libertinage et l’histoire by Stéphanie Genand (2005) and Histoire du libertinage by Didier Foucault (2007). The extensive scholarly literature on Casanova and Sade, and also on the opera Don Giovanni, further informs the discussion of libertinism in the 1780s. On the history of sexual predation important historical work has been done by Ruggiero, writing about sex crime in Venice, but also by Georges Vigarello in his history of rape, published in French in 1998 and in English translation in 2001.⁵

The final section of the book considers the girl herself, Paolina Lozaro, eight years old in 1785, the victim of Franceschini’s sexual attentions. The testimony of witnesses offers evidence of how she fit into the context of contemporary perspectives on children and childhood’s innocence. By considering Jean-Jacques Rousseau, his ideas about children, and even his own biographical experience in Venice in the 1740s, it is possible to see how the articulation of innocence in the case of Paolina Lozaro intersected with the Enlightenment’s new conception of childhood. The entire field of the history of childhood received an enormous impetus with the publication in 1960 of the work of Philippe Ariès on family and childhood in the ancien régime; the research of the subsequent generation has been comprehensively consolidated within the Encyclopedia of Children and Childhood in History and Society, edited by Paula Fass (2004). Historical studies of individual children have pointed toward increasingly subtle understandings of childhood in historical context, such as Margaret King’s book about Renaissance Venice, The Death of the Child Valerio Marcello (1994), and David Kertzer’s book about Risorgimento Italy, The Kidnapping of Edgardo Mortara (1997).⁶ The case of Paolina Lozaro may serve as a point of entry for analyzing the historical complexities of childhood in the context of the European Enlightenment.

The early modern structures of Venetian law and justice and the rise of the Venetian coffeehouse as a forum for gossip and public discussion conditioned a notable cultural combustibility in the prosecution of Gaetano Franceschini in 1785. Particularly explosive was the ideological encounter between the values of enlightened libertinism and the new Rousseauist perspective on childhood’s innocence. In the case of Paolina Lozaro, this intersection of institutions and values—modern and early modern, enlightened and traditional—produced a historically unprecedented, intellectually confused, but retrospectively recognizable confrontation with the issues of child sexual abuse on the threshold of modern European history.

PART ONE

The Secret Denunciation

What are the reasons that justify secret accusations and punishments? Public safety, security, and maintaining the form of government? But what a strange constitution. . . . Can there be crimes, that is, public offenses, of which it is not in the interest of everyone that they be made a public example, that is, with a public judgment?

—Beccaria, On Crimes and Punishments

ONE

The Parish Priest

On September 2, 1785, Bortolo Fiorese, a priest at the church of Sant’Angelo in Venice, penned a secret denunciation to the Venetian government: Yesterday I went to the apartment of Signore Gaetano Franceschini, a resident of this parish, and removed from that apartment, in the absence of the master, a girl of about eight years, Paolina Lozaro by name, and I delivered her into the hands of her mother Maria. I was driven by the reports I had obtained about the bad reputation and depraved inclinations of Signore Gaetano, and about his keeping the girl, the night before, scandalously in his own bed.¹ That same day, in immediate response to his denunciation, Father Fiorese was summoned to the Doge’s Palace for questioning before a tribunal of the law. So began the legal investigation of Gaetano Franceschini in a case that would claim the attention of the Venetian judicial system for the rest of the year. A tribunal of four duly elected Venetian patricians fulfilled their civic responsibilities by overseeing the interrogation of an entire neighborhood in an attempt to determine exactly what happened to Paolina Lozaro during a single night in the home of Gaetano Franceschini before Father Fiorese removed her from the premises.

It all began on the last day of August, in the middle of the morning, according to Father Fiorese. I happened to be in the sacristy of my church, and a woman wearing a silk shawl approached me and called me aside, and told me the following story. She said to me that she had just that moment come from confession. The woman in the silk shawl introduced herself to the priest as the housekeeper of Signore Gaetano Franceschini and confided that her master had recently made her an alarming proposition. The housekeeper, a recent widow, had two young daughters who were being raised outside the city, since their mother had to live as a servant in her master’s house. Franceschini had suggested that he might employ one of the daughters in his household as well, especially since he had recently received some very particular medical advice: "He had been advised to find a young girl [una tenera ragazza] to sleep with him so that her warmth might reinvigorate his own. Not in the least deceived by this medical pretext," the housekeeper declined the proposition and kept her daughters in the country, but she herself continued to work in Franceschini’s service.²

This morning, however, as she told Father Fiorese, her master had ordered her to go to the church of Sant’Angelo where she was to meet a certain Friulian woman, a Furlana, with a young daughter. The housekeeper had no trouble recognizing the Furlana, who was lingering there in the church with her daughter and was obviously waiting to meet someone. Father Fiorese, testifying before the tribunal, explained the housekeeper’s dilemma and his own reaction to her story.

She was to meet a Furlana with a girl, and to bring the girl home, as a substitute for her own daughter to have with him in bed. She found the Furlana and the girl right there in the church, but, feeling herself constrained by the obligations of virtue and religion, she invoked my advice and assistance. Having heard about this interesting matter, I did not however believe that I should immediately give complete credence to the story, especially since the suspicion occurred to me that this woman actually wanted to put forward her own daughter and was seeking by this means to deprive the other girl of her good fortune [provvidenza]. Nevertheless, I took the expedient of advising that woman to go home and tell her master, of whom she seemed frightened [dimostrava soggezione], that she had not found the Furlana.³

The silk shawl was known variously in Venetian as the zendale, the zendà, or the zendado. It would probably have been black in eighteenth-century Venice, worn over the head, wrapped around the body, perhaps even partly covering the face, if a woman, for one reason or another, wished to conceal her identity. This woman, Franceschini’s housekeeper, must certainly have hoped for some discretion as she revealed her master’s intentions to Father Fiorese.

The priest immediately perceived the sinister aspect of the situation—that is, the recruitment of a warm young body—but nevertheless his first suspicion was directed against the housekeeper herself rather than her master. Even though Father Fiorese seemed to understand perfectly well that little girls should not be employed to reinvigorate old men in bed, he also had no doubt that for a girl from the lower levels of Venetian society it would be a piece of good fortune to be taken into the service and under the protection of a prosperous older gentleman. The housekeeper presented herself to the priest as reluctant to play the part of a procuress, professing to be too troubled to follow through on her master’s order, but the priest thought she might be merely trying to procure the position for her own daughter by obstructing the other girl’s opportunity with a smokescreen of sexual insinuations.

Donne veneziane in zendà. Venetian women wearing black silk shawls, like that of Maria Bardini the housekeeper. From Pompeo Molmenti, La storia di Venezia nella vita privata.

Father Fiorese did not seem amazed at the brazenness of proposing to use a young body to warm an old one, and it may have seemed even unremarkable to a man who knew something about sinners in eighteenth-century Venice. If he was familiar with the Bible, which was not particularly likely for a Catholic priest at that time, he might have recalled the precedent of King David: Now king David was old and stricken in years; and they covered him with clothes, but he gat no heat. Wherefore his servants said unto him, Let there be brought for my lord the king a young virgin: and let her stand before the king, and let her cherish him, and let her lie in thy bosom, that my lord the king may get heat. In the end, they delivered a virgin, who cherished the king, and ministered to him: but the king knew her not.⁴ Eighteenth-century medical notions still involved a significant measure of popular superstition, including an accumulated traditional wisdom about age and youth, heat and cold, health and debility, sex and virginity. At the same time, Venice in the eighteenth century was enlightened enough for a parish priest and a conscientious housekeeper to agree that the medical pursuit of a young girl’s bodily warmth was surely the pretext for unspoken predatory intentions.

Church of Sant’Angelo with Campanile, in Campo Sant’Angelo. The engraving shows the campo before the demolition of the church and its bell tower in 1837. The leaning tower of San Stefano is visible in the background. From Souvenirs de Venise (1836), by Giovanni Pividor. By permission of the Biblioteca del Museo Correr, Venice.

The urban landscape of Venice today is not altogether different from that which Father Fiorese inhabited in 1785. Many of the churches of his day still survive with their treasures of sacred art, but the church of Sant’Angelo does not. Dedicated to the Archangel Michael, the medieval church of Sant’Angelo was demolished in 1837, so today the Campo Sant’Angelo preserves only the memory of the church in the name of the square. The Campo Sant’Angelo lies between the Accademia bridge and the Rialto, a busy space in the heart of Venice; two beautiful Gothic palaces with delicately pointed arches at the windows, Palazzo Gritti and Palazzo Duodo, face each other across one end of the square.

Campo Sant’Angelo today, without the church and its bell tower. The leaning tower of San Stefano still stands in the background

In the eighteenth century the church of Sant’Angelo was known to contain Titian’s last painting, the Pietà (1575), at one of the altars—but the painting is to be found today in the Accademia museum.⁵ The Pietà shows the Virgin Mary with the body of Christ in a painted architectural niche, while Nicodemus kneels before them, and Mary Magdalene, one hand raised, seems to be stepping out of the painting toward the viewer—into the church of Sant’Angelo. The Titian Pietà would have been very familiar to Father Fiorese. It would certainly have been present in his church on that last day of August in 1785, the day that he received the unusual confidence of the woman in the silk shawl.

Having sent her away, Father Fiorese turned his attention to the Furlana and her daughter. The Furlana was Maria Lozaro, an immigrant from Friuli in the city of Venice. Friuli was a province of the Venetian Republic northeast of Venice, at the head of the Adriatic gulf, adjoining the Austrian and Slovenian provinces of the Habsburg monarchy. Within the Venetian state Friuli was also a border region between Venice’s mainland Italian territories and the subject lands of the eastern Adriatic shore, Istria and Dalmatia, with their extensively Slavic populations. In the metropolis of Venice there was a significant immigrant population from Friuli, usually poor and often looking for employment in domestic service or menial labor. Friuli and the Friulians had a distinctive history and regional character. A Furlana would have spoken the regional Friulian language as her native tongue and would even perhaps have been characteristically dressed in provincial costume.

To someone like Father Fiorese, a native Venetian, Maria Lozaro was a humble provincial subject of Venice, ethnically distinct in her Friulian extraction, and he designated her simply as the Furlana.

I called aside the Furlana, who was already in the church, and asked her the reason for which she was there. She replied to me that an older gentleman—though she didn’t know who he was—had sought out her daughter, to keep her with him as an adoptive daughter [come figlia d’anima], and had promised to pay her a daily wage corresponding to eight lire monthly, for which reason he was coming to meet the girl, and the mother was waiting for him to come and take the girl away as agreed. I then tried opportunely [destramente] to get her to reflect, by telling her that entrusting a girl to someone she did not know could be too risky [troppo azzardo], that the excessively advantageous offer should have given her some well-founded suspicion, and that I too had some inkling of that sort. And so therefore I advised her for the moment to remove herself to the nearby church of San Stefano, and I would come half an hour later to tell her something more definite, since just then I could not go, since I had to deal with another interesting matter—which was in fact true. My intention then was to increase her suspicions in such a way as to make her distance herself for that day, so as to preserve the secrecy of the other woman who had confided in me, and so I would have time to understand the matter properly. The Furlana was persuaded to leave, from which I recognized the innocence of her readiness to abandon her young daughter, and she headed toward San Stefano.⁶

If Father Fiorese’s first suspicion was that the woman in the silk shawl was trying to obtain the position for her own daughter, his second suspicion was that the Furlana was no less eager to seize upon this good fortune. By leaving the church, and thus forgoing the rendezvous, she proved her innocence to him. Father Fiorese had clearly contemplated the guilty possibility that, in order to attain such good fortune as a wage of eight lire monthly, the Furlana might have been perfectly willing to install her young daughter in the old gentleman’s bed. Suspicious of the housekeeper, suspicious of the mother, the priest was also, but not yet extremely or exclusively—suspicious of the gentleman himself, Gaetano Franceschini.

All through the priest’s account of this episode in the church of Sant’Angelo, one person present in the church remained strangely invisible. Maria Lozaro must have been accompanied in the church by her daughter, the eight-year-old girl who was the object of all concerns and the reason for all suspicions. Yet Father Fiorese made no remark whatsoever about her age or appearance or demeanor, gave no clue as to whether the child seemed frightened or cheerful or bored or preoccupied. By the time Father Fiorese saw her again, she would have spent a night in Franceschini’s bed, and the priest would have much more reason to be concerned about her. For the moment, however, he had some other interesting matter to attend to, and his mere half an hour of other business was going to prove to be all the time that was needed to precipitate the disaster of which he claimed to have an inkling.

The walk from the Campo Sant’Angelo to the Campo San Stefano takes only a matter of minutes, as they are almost adjacent squares. San Stefano is not a small church, and Father Fiorese might have had to spend a few minutes looking for the Furlana inside, in the magnificent Gothic structure with its Venetian celebrity tombs of the sixteenth-century composer Giovanni Gabrieli and the seventeenth-century military hero Francesco Morosini. The priest might even have noted the modern, that is, eighteenth-century, painting of The Massacre of the Innocents by Gaspare Diziani. The innocent child of Maria Lozaro, however, was not there in San Stefano. Father Fiorese had had half an hour to reflect upon the situation and may have now felt prepared to say something more definite, but mother and daughter were nowhere to be found.

The church of Sant’Angelo defined a parish and marked the center of a Venetian neighborhood in which Father Fiorese, as the parish priest, would have been an important figure, occupied with many strands of church and community business.⁷ His failure to find the Furlana in San Stefano seems not to have alarmed him immediately, and he probably put her problem out of his mind as he continued with his parochial responsibilities. Later that same day, however, Father Fiorese was taking a coffee break from his business when he encountered Maria Lozaro again, this time without her daughter. Having retired nearby to the coffeehouse, to chat with someone, I saw the Furlana approaching, agitated. She told him what had happened earlier in the day, how she had left the church of Sant’Angelo intending to go to San Stefano, as he had suggested, but Gaetano Franceschini had been waiting for her in the Campo Sant’Angelo as she came out of the church. Maria Lozaro was surprised to see him: "and being frightened [per soggezione], did not have the courage to avoid being led home by him. She was already anxious after Father Fiorese’s warning, and she still did not know Franceschini’s name. Franceschini, however, having brought her to his apartment, tried to be reassuring and made various promises in order to get her to leave the child with him, suggesting however that the Furlana should instruct her daughter to obey him in everything, and advising her that she not come back to see the girl until the following Sunday."⁸ In fact, Franceschini lived just upstairs from the coffeehouse, in the same building, and the girl was in his apartment at the very same time that Father Fiorese was chatting and drinking coffee below.

Neighborhood of Sant’Angelo: number 111 shows the Campo Sant’Angelo with the church in the middle of the Campo; number 106 shows the adjoining location of San Stefano; number 122 shows Piazza San Marco with the Doge’s Palace. The drawing of the streets and squares does not appear to be absolutely accurate; the map also shows some canals that have been filled in since the eighteenth century and no longer exist. A Plan of the City of Venice, London, John Stockdale (1776?; reprinted 1800).

The priest was concerned but hesitant to intervene. I did not have sufficient grounds to decide, he informed the tribunal, so he advised Maria Lozaro to make inquiries about Franceschini. He also made inquiries himself in the neighborhood but learned nothing definitive: "I could discover nothing more than abstract rumors that Franceschini was a sensual man [uomo sensuale]."⁹ By the defensive quality of his testimony, his pleading of insufficient grounds, his insisting upon his many duties, Father Fiorese made it clear enough that he felt some qualms about his dilatory commitment to this matter in its earliest stages. While he was soliciting rumors from around the neighborhood, that last day of August waned into the Venetian summer evening. The child