Frascato

This city block, which now houses the Prada store, was known in Dante’s years here as the Frascato. There was once an internal piazzetta at the center of the block and around it were grouped numerous inns, taverns and bordellos. Indeed, one locale was called la Baldacca, or Baldracca, which came to be a term synonymous with prostitute. While we don’t imagine that Dante spent too much time here, it was the kind of place he is thinking of when he describes joining up with the demons called the Malebranche:

Noi andavam con li diece demoni.
Ahi fiera compagnia! ma ne la chiesa
coi santi, e in taverna coi ghiottoni.

(Inferno XXII.13-15)

We were walking with the ten demons.
Ah, what company! In church with the saints,
and in the pub with the gluttons.

This whole city block remained a place of singular ill repute throughout the fourteenth century and was the location of Florence’s most famous heterosexual bordello of the fifteenth century. Not surprisingly, it was also at the center of the greatest concentration of homosexual prostitution throughout the Renaissance.

In 1571, when Cosimo I de’ Medici needed a place into which to force all the Jews of Florence, he chose this city block. To facilitate the implementation of the atrocity, he had most of its structures torn down and replaced them with what looked like a huge stable meant to house what amounted to inmates. There were three ways into the piazzetta and all of them were locked closed at midnight.

In his 2008 novel, Enchantress of Florence, Salman Rushdie mentions the brothels here and imagines “the dancing bears and dwarf jugglers reappear[ing].”