The Market and the City: Square, Street and Architecture in Early Modern Europe (review)

One of the appeals of this book is that it is a genuinely comparative study. Taking a range of major commercial cities including Venice, Antwerp, Amsterdam, London and Seville, Donatella Calbi has produced a pan-European study of the development of the marketplace as both a space and site of commerce. It is, in effect, a study of Early Modern town planning. It is also refreshing to read an account which, for all that the initial impetus was from Venice, is not bound by the division between northern or southern Europe. That it also includes the impact of Arabic influences in southern Spain adds considerable breadth. Trade, as Calabi demonstrates, has always been both domestic and international, and major trading centres responded to both these needs.

This ambitious study aims to explore the physical configuration of the marketplace and how it was transformed throughout the Early Modern period. What makes this unusual is that while there have been studies of the attempts to regulate these sites in various European centres, there has been little done on the impact of specific localities, such as the layout of streets and squares, the physicality of warehouses and lodgings, shops and street stalls. At the same time, those interested in the architecture of public and domestic buildings, such as guildhalls, or even more industrial structures such as warehouses, have tended to examine these within the context of architectural questions. They are often more concerned with the articulation of individual structures than with how these operated within the context of a wider urban environment. To meet the challenges of this daunting task, Calabi draws on prints and plans, contemporary accounts and local legislation. She provides a rich array of images to support her points.

The structure of this book is rather strange. Calabi repeatedly refers to the same buildings and places but from different perspectives, to the point where this becomes confusing. Her book is divided into two broad sections. The first looks at broad questions in a comparative way, such as the impact of reform and regulation, the location and storage of specific goods, as well as more specific subjects such as bridges with shops, access to markets and the architecture of the square. Thus in chapter three Calabi addresses the location of the market within cities, on the outskirts in the case of Venice, Paris and Nuremberg; in the centre in Augsburg and Lübeck, or spread across different locations as in Seville and London. In her discussion of Seville she also outlines the differences between 'western' and 'eastern' attitudes to markets. She also traces the evolution of such sites as the Rialto in Venice and Les Halles in Paris both architecturally, legislatively and organizationally. Her approach is varied according to the chapter, sometimes writing a series of case studies, and in others doing a more integrated comparative study.

In the second part, Calabi focuses on the form and use of commercial buildings, such as covered halls, meeting areas, banks, granaries and warehouses. She looks at the development of the 'square'. Here the problems of translation become most obvious. For one thing, it is interesting how few of her squares are square. There is no attempt to discuss what she means, although I suspect in the original Italian she may well have been referring to the 'piazza'. Certainly that would make her frequent references to the 'geometry of the square' less confusing or awkward. The translation is at times clumsy, and probably captures well the original Italian flavour, but it is not always easy to read.

These structural and linguistic difficulties are not helped by the lack of referencing in the body of the text to the illustrations that accompany it. These are placed together in the middle and the reader is forced to continuously flick through them to try and work out which she is referring to in...