Giovanni and Lusanna: Love and Marriage in Renaissance Florence

Brucker explores what Giovanni and Lusanna’s relationship reveals about romance and social status in fifteenth-century Florence. Though the couple’s relationship generally coincides with their society’s standards for marriage and romance, it is still unique in many ways.

In fifteenth-century Florence, aristocratic bachelors such as Giovanni typically would not marry until later in life, after they had fully established themselves in the business world. It was common for them to have extramarital affairs with sexual partners who were “social inferiors: servants, peasant girls, poor widows, and—occasionally—married women” (78). Giovanni’s affair with the poorer Lusanna probably would have been accepted by his peers, and it is likely that he would not receive censure from a court, despite laws forbidding adulterous relationships.

For women, however, the social mores were far stricter. If a woman had extramarital relations, it was highly frowned upon, especially if she were married like Lusanna. Lusanna’s affairs become well known throughout her neighborhood. At one point, one of her neighbors nailed horns to Lusanna’s house—a common act signifying that the occupants of the house had acted immorally.

Due to her adultery, Lusanna develops a reputation as a “mala femina”—one who “violated her marriage vow and dishonored herself, her husband, and her family” (89). However, Brucker notes that in spite of her behavior, Lusanna is never fully “perceived as a fallen woman or shunned as a pariah by her neighbors” (90). Though her affair with Giovanni is well known, Lusanna never publicly meets with Giovanni, and she retains her respectability by always dressing like a widow. Brucker also points out that Florence’s rigid “moral code” was applied less stringently to artisan women, who “enjoyed a greater degree of social freedom than did their chaperoned, aristocratic sisters” (90).

Lusanna and Giovanni’s story offers a unique view into the “social structures and values in Medicean Florence” (94) because their highly stratified and hierarchical society confined most individuals to their own social classes. Giovanni’s freedom to travel allowed his relationship with Lusanna to bridge the gap between their social classes. Wealthy merchants like Giovanni frequently traveled to other cities for business, granting them a greater geographic mobility than members of the artisanal class. In contrast, Artisans’ social life was mostly confined to the specific neighborhood they lived and worked in. The artisanal class was also highly divided. Craftsmen who worked with their hands, like Lusanna’s father and her first husband, were close to the bottom of the social order. Such stratification made the marriage between an artisanal woman and a rich bachelor highly unlikely. Brucker notes that no other marriage similar to Giovanni and Lusanna’s exists in the historical record.