A guided tour through the smellscape of medieval Bologna

We are used to descriptions of sights and sounds from history, but what about smells? Can we know what a medieval city smelled like? Join us on this guided tour of Bologna's smellscape.

Guy Fassler

7/23/20246 min read

In a famous scene from Monty Python and the Holy Grail, a poised King Arthur passes through a medieval hamlet. Riding past the Bring-Out-Your-Dead guy and his customer, the following dialogue ensued:

‘Who’s that then?’

‘I don’t know, must be a king’

‘Why?’

‘He hasn’t got shit all over him’

This scene is a brilliant representation of the popular perception of the Middle Ages as a dirty and smelly time in which everyone was perpetually covered in shit (except maybe the king). This view of the Middle Ages, however, is largely unmerited. Medieval people used to wash regularly and cared a lot about cleanliness, which was seen by the science of the time as connected with preventing illness. Sewage was, for the most part, carefully managed and drinking water kept clean. We know about all this from the mounds of contemporary urban regulations which were meant to keep sanitation in good order.

But! it is not my intention to suggest that the Middle Ages smelled only of roses. By our standards, the medieval urban environment would have been quite difficult on the nose (although after a while you can get used to any smell, just ask someone who works in a candle shop). In all fairness, even our own modern cities can be rather malodourous sometimes; it seems to be a part of living in a densely populated environment. But the medieval smells we’re after have all faded ages ago, so how can we rediscover them?

Our guidebook for this tour of the Bolognese smellscape is the registers of the Office of Dirt (fango) which were discussed in a previous post. The notaries who compiled these ledgers filled them with detailed information about when (and often, where) offences against cleanliness and good order were committed. These notaries did not often describe how things smelt but they left some clues for us to reconstruct a medieval smellscape. Words like ‘fetid’, ‘rotten’, and mentions of excrements or production processes that involve animal products can give us a good indication as to what the city could have smelt like. We also have to use our imagination a bit (which is something that as historians we generally try to avoid because of the risk of introducing anachronisms into our analysis…)

But let’s begin our tour and see what we can find!

An olfactory tour in Bologna

Before we head out, a useful piece of advice that we find in Giovanni Boccaccio’s Decameron (1353) is to hold in our hand some flowers, fragrant herbs or spices and give them a good sniff whenever we come across nasty smells. The scientific understanding in the Middle Ages was that these bad smells, or miasma, can cause serious illness, and we certainly wouldn’t want that. Boccaccio tells us that Florentines in 1348 thought this practice could ward off even the Black Death.

We start at Piazza Maggiore, or piazza del comune, as it was then called. It’s the beating heart of the city, surrounded by government palaces. Sometimes it functioned as a market, sometimes as a stage for the theatrics of political power. Today there are some vendors here and there selling fruit and vegetables, eggs and chestnuts, herbs and cheese.

We head towards the north side of the piazza and… is that fish? Must be, because we just arrived at the pescaria, or fish market, near the Palazzo del Podestà. Fishmongers sell there all sorts of freshwater fish and prawns that came from the local rivers (such as the Reno, Savena, and Idice) and the elaborate system of canals in and around Bologna. The thing is that on a hot summer day like this one, (with no refrigeration or ice available) fish start to smell, so we better move on…

We go on towards the market street known as mercato di mezzo (today, via Rizzoli) and make for Piazza di Porta Ravegnana which lies under the famous two towers, the Garisenda and Asinelli. Just before we arrive at the small piazza, there’s a smell of bread being baked. It comes from a nearby bakery. That’s quite nice, and with all the talk about unpleasant smells (which is what often got documented), it’s important to remember that in the medieval city there were also plenty of normal wholesome smells like that of food being made (fried onions come to mind), burnt firewood, the smell of the rain after a long dry spell or freshly cut grass.

But don’t breathe in too deeply, because there’s a whiff of something coming from behind the bakery, which seems like raw meat. It is not coming from any old butcher’s shop, this is the Beccaria Magna, the great meat market run by the butchers’ guild. Even though it sits just on top of the Aposa (or Avesa as it used to be called, a small river flowing in canals under the city) which would supply plenty of running water for cleaning, the smells of butchered animals and their byproducts could still be quite harsh on the nose.

Let’s go somewhere else. We can take a left here and go north through the alleys towards the parish of Santa Maria Maggiore. On the way there we find quite a few men working leather under the porticoes. It’s a fairly nasty and laborious job by all accounts: in order to make animal skins into leather or parchment you’d need to go to the butcher’s and get a hide from a butchered animal (ask him to clean it up a bit if he can be bothered), then you’d soak it in lime (the mineral, not citrus) until all the bits fall off. Then you’d start gradually stretching it on a special wooden frame and scraping the remaining flesh and hair with a rounded knife called a lunellum until the skin reaches the desired thickness. However unpleasant it may sound; you can be assured that it smells worse. The men we see, our guidebook tells us, are engaged in some rigorous scraping of the skins (scharnabant coria), and the smells (and sights) are truly stomach churning so we should move on.

A monk scraping skin using a lunellum. (Staatsbibliothek Bamberg, Msc.Patr.5, f. 1v).

As we keep heading north, we nearly arrive at Campo del Mercato, the city’s main livestock market, and we can see a woman rushing back into one of the houses near the market. That was Margarita, the widow of Giacomo di Falcone (Malgarita uxor condam Jacobi Falconi), and if we keep walking towards the market, we will soon find out why. Once again there is something we can smell before we can see it. And it appears that Margarita has dumped some dung and manure and other filth (teracium et lectamen et aliam inmondiciam) in the market. The habit of some people to dispose of the content of their chamber pots in such an inconsiderate way was not only nasty, but also illegal (and you can rest assured that Bartolomeo and Domenico who also saw the whole thing, testified against her and she got a fine for 20 soldi). It is likely that Margarita thought she could get away with it if she dumped her household waste in a place that was packed with livestock several days a week, and since these animals generally show very little deference to the dignity of public markets and defecate when and where they please. Surely no one would notice a bit more filth, right?

But what should one do with their raw sewage? You dump it in an androna, which was a narrow, walled-off space between houses with access to drains. Some people kept a seat (sedila) in their androna which made it a precursor to the indoor toilet. These structures were washed with water routinely but could still get quite nasty if they were not cleaned regularly or sealed properly, especially during the summer. We can go and look at one that belongs to Paolo di Oddofredo. Outside Paolo’s house we find an enraged neighbour called Giovanni de Fulgosiis who works in the city’s treasury. He's annoyed because Paolo apparently hasn’t cleaned his androna in a while, and it started to stink up Giovanni’s dining room. If this is not resolved soon, he threatens, he’ll make a complaint with the authorities!

Well, we’ll leave him to it. This is a good point to conclude our odorific tour of fourteenth-century Bologna. It was quite smelly, but hopefully enabled us to think about different aspects of everyday life and the experiences of city dwellers in medieval cities. Do give us five stars on Trip Advisor if you enjoyed it.

Note

While we know of the relative ubiquity of bakeries in medieval cities (and Bologna is no exception) the fango registers did not enable me to pinpoint the location of any such establishment. Nevertheless, I took the liberty to imagine a bakery near the end of the Mercato di mezzo, as we know existed there later in Casa dei Casoli, according to Sebastiano Giovannini who wrote in the nineteenth century.

Sources

https://www.originebologna.com/

Archivio di Stato di Bologna, Comune, Curia del Podestà, Ufficio del fango, b.14, 1314-15, f. 24v

ASB, Fango, b. 16, 1320 II, reg. 1, f. 13r.

ASB, Fango, b.17, 1323 II, c.24r.

Piazza Maggiore or piazza del comune in Bologna

Mercato di mezzo (Via Rizzoli)

A Bolognese portico and a monk scraping skin using a lunellum