The trans ghetto

 This post is about sex workers. It's also about the trans ghetto of Genoa. There is an overlap between the two communities.

This is also the last of my posts on my trip to Genoa in January. The previous three are:

Moby Dick and the Holy Grail (with cake)  (about art, hot drinks, vintage clothing and Columbus)

Lady? Maid? Or creepy old man? (about palaces, food and music)

Old new things and new old things (about shops, jeans and St George)

You may also like to look at my post two years ago about leading female Renaissance painter, Artemisia Gentileschi, whose rape as a young woman influenced her depictions of put-upon heroines, and this compliments today's topic:

Turning the tables on male violence - a lesson from a lady 

I am indebted to the journalist in my daily paper, which is published in Genoa, for some of the historic information on sex work in the city in response to a reader's letter earlier this week. The reader was complaining about certain ladies plying for trade within a stone's throw of the magnificent Rolli Palaces that I described, and what the tourists must think of Genoa as a result. But as I pointed out in my second post, the palaces themselves are full of suggestive art, and as the journalist's reply explains, Genoa is a busy, working port with far more serious eyesores that need attention. Let's face reality, too: big cities have always been a haven for the oldest form of entertainment, and as for sailors ... well, they have always had a reputation on shore! 

In Italy, prostitution has never been illegal. Indeed, sex work is protected under articles 2 and 13 of the current Constitution as it is an "inviolable personal freedom." There was a time when the local brothel was as much a fixture in any town as the bakery or the church and the Madam was a respected member of the community. 

Incidentally, the word casino means "little house", which was originally the brothel and then became a place for cards and other gambling games, too. Presumably a bit like those classic saloons of the Wild West where cowboys and miners would go for a drink, a card game, a girl and maybe a fight. Except here the Madams tended to keep good order in their little houses. The authorities used to tax the workers and the casinos, and there were state regulations governing the trade. Indeed, the prostitutes of Genoa of the 14th and 15th Centuries paid a levy to the port authority of 5 soldi a day which funded new harbour walls. A soldo was a silver coin similar to an English or German shilling. That was quite a lot of money 500 years ago so presumably trade was good. Ironically, given that they'd paid for it, solicitation was not permitted in the area of the harbour itself. A plaque at the old harbour today acknowledges sex workers' contribution to its construction. My journalist points out to the correspondent that the square right by the Rolli Palaces is called Piazza delle Fontane Marose, meaning Amorous Fountains Square, precisely because people would go there looking for a bit of loving. 

This all changed in 1958 when the Merlin Law came into effect, which closed the brothels in order to combat human trafficking and the exploitation of the prostitution of others. The Merlin Law (named after Lina Merlin, the first women to be elected senator, who introduced it) reflects the 1949 UN resolution on the same theme and similar moves earlier in France. Government regulation and taxation of the trade was replaced by this law. It was controversial legislation, beneficial in many ways, damaging in others: a brothel did provide physical protection, greater financial stability and health checks for its employees who nowadays have to ply their trade on their own with greater dangers from clients and disease. Yet current news suggests that trafficking and exploitation still go on - and how! - and yet despite all these protective laws, prosecuting well-connected and morbidly wealthy men for the crime of exploiting (mainly) women still seems to result in lenient sentences for that. You usually have to try other charges, like tax evasion (in the case of Al Capone), industrial espionage, misconduct in public office and the like.

Moving on. The large and ancient ports of Italy - Naples, Venice, Genoa, Taranto and so on - have very old trans communities. Where there are big cities you will find more trans people able to meet up and form a community. And ports, with their exchange of cultures and the social acceptance that results, are more inclined to be tolerant towards different people than a close-knit inland community. So there has been a trans community in Genoa since who knows when. Of course, that doesn't mean that the community isn't full of people who have arrived there after being rejected by family, spouses and friends and many have had to live by sex work in the narrow city lanes, the so-called trans ghetto. 

Back to the past, and spare a thought for Rolandina, a trans sex worker in Venice who died in 1354, the earliest record of such a person. Previously living as male under the name Rolando, her wife died in the Black Death and she then lived as a woman, selling eggs by day and joining the other girls in the streets at night. She carried on her work for 7 years before she was denounced to the authorities and was condemned to death under the sodomy laws. The hypocrisy is that a man could get a light sentence for buggery if he was "active", i.e. a top, the more masculine position. Poor Rolandina, being very feminine and therefore deemed "passive" in her relations, was given the harshest sentence permitted by law. See comments above on leniency towards men in sexual cases.

The best known lady of the trans ghetto in Genoa today is Rossella who had her own run-ins with the law in her early days. She has been the trans community's mother hen for decades and is the go-to barometer of the health of the community. Everyone knows her, she's frequently interviewed and she even has a blog, although it's only in Italian.

I myself am still struggling to find a trans group in this region to socialise with. One problem is that trans life in Italy has this long history linked to sex work and I'm not going to go down that route, even if I could build some harbour walls with my takings. So I haven't made contact with the community in Genoa, I just went to take a look.

 

This photo is one of the classic ones taken by Lisetta Carmi of a Genoese trans sex worker with a potential client and I would like to end this by inviting you to take a look at some of the fabulous photos she took of the "travestiti" of Genoa in the 1960s that I posted previously. 

The 2023 Carmi exhibition in London, "Identities"

And in 2020 on the more general theme of Trans Lives in the 1960s

Both the photos I've put up here are extracts from the fabulous Identities exhibition catalogue. 

That concludes my series of posts on Genoa. I'm sorry they've been rather long but there has been a lot to say of relevance. I will return there for more sightseeing when the weather improves. 

And just as a final word, I mentioned the origins of the word casino. The word ghetto comes from Venice and it meant the foundry or copperworks that was, inevitably, the polluted, grimy end of town. It was there that, in 1516, the government relegated the Jews of the city, thus forming the first ghetto in the modern sense. 

Sue x