Veronica Franco vs. Maffio Venier: sex, death, and poetry in Cinquecento Venice

Italica, Fall-Winter, 2006 by Dolora Chapelle Wojciehowski

Pocky, stinky, encrusted with boils that she picks and sells for fertilizer, Veronica is a one-woman "guerra contra la sanita" [a war against public health] and a "[m]are del morbo" [a sea of pestilence]. Maffio has gone from complaining about her high fees in the first poem to attempting to destroy her business and her reputation with a syphilo-gynephobic tirade.

Maffio imagines alternately the corrupted exterior and the frightening interior spaces of Veronica's body. Her external body is a frightening spectacle and a public nuisance; her interior is a public space, an open grave into which hapless men may find themselves buried. With unabashed, folkloric gynephobia, Maffio recounts the story of a certain client from Treviso who met his end when accidentally suffocated by one of Veronica's pendulous breasts. To hide the deed, she buries the man inside her body. (22) In another tercet, her box is bigger than a boat; her anus bigger than a washtub; she is the queen of the bordello:

   Potta pi larga, che no xe un battello,
   Bus de culo pi largo d'un mastello,
      Rezina del bordello. (Dazzi 38)

What is interesting about this poem, if we may call it that, is that Veronica's virtual body expands in Maffio's fantasy far beyond the borders of her physical frame. Sometimes immense and engulfing, other times diffuse and formless, she threatens to contaminate her neighborhood and indeed the city "con el putrefar l'aer d'intorno" [by putrifying the atmosphere, Dazzi 40]. With that line and others Maffio compares Veronica to the plague, which, in fact, would claim one quarter of the population of Venice between the years 1575-1577. (23) It is worth noting that Maffio's verse and Veronica's edition of the Terze rime would have been circulated and/or published shortly after the onset of the plague in the fall of 1575. Veronica is "el summario d'ogni malattia": syphilis, plague, leprosy, and every other disease, for that matter (Dazzi 40). Alas, there exists no remedy--"no val recetta / Ne medesina eletta" to defend against the contagion she spreads (Dazzi 39).

The poem ends strangely. The speaker calls Veronica a cliff ("un precipitio"), a depth ("un profondo"), an abyss ("un'abisso"), and a chaos ("un chaos") (Dazzi 40). Though Maffio claims mastery over his subject matter, Veronica's body, he seems dwarfed by the abyss, the chaos, that threatens to engulf him. Veronica's malignant force is far greater than his own, and that is the problem and irony of the poem.

The poem Veronica, ver unica puttana must have elicited a complicated response from its audience. The speaker forces his listeners or readers to confront the reality of syphilis, as well as plague and other diseases, while enabling them to envision that threat as contained within the virtual body of a scapegoat. The poem does not contain that threat, but implicitly requires the containment or exile of the source of contagion. Most likely these repulsive images of Veronica Franco inspired not only laughter, but also fear or dread, among members of her coterie.