Water Quality in Early Modern European Cities
Monitoring Water Quality in Early Modern
European Cities
The Venetian Case
David Gentilcore
8 April 2025 – 5 PM (CEST)
When looking to the past, we need to re-examine the assumptions we bring to the questions of water quality. What were these assumptions?
Early modern Europeans knew, through long experience, which waters were “best”, as they saw them, and to take certain precautions when it came to the consumption and use of fresh water. Of course, the rationale behind these measures was necessarily couched in a different medical philosophy and their efficacy sometimes questionable from the perspective of modern bio-medicine.
In the Republic of Venice, a flourishing and independent state until 1797, fresh water quality was monitored by the “Provveditori alla Salute” (or Health Office), the body responsible for overseeing public health and hygiene, established in late fifteenth century to deal with plague epidemics.
One of the largest and most economically vibrant of early modern European cities, Venice was uniquely dependent on rainwater capture for all of its freshwater needs, which fed several thousand “well-cisterns” located in the city’s public squares (campi), courtyards, private houses and religious institutions.
Nowhere else was the approach to their use so systematic and widespread, the city concerned so populous, the technology so sophisticated and the management so carefully regulated as in Venice.
My talk will present the results of research in progress into the role of the Venice’s Health Office in monitoring and managing the city’s freshwater supply during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, demonstating that pre-modern societies did not take water quality for granted and did indeed have methods for evaluating and managing it.
About the Speaker ...
David Gentilcore is Professor of Modern History at the “Ca’ Foscari” University of Venice.
He focuses on the history of popular religion, the history of medicine and health, and the history of food and diet. He studied history and Italian studies at the University of Toronto, before taking a Master’s degree in History at McMaster University in Canada and completed his PhD at the University of Cambridge, with a thesis on the system of the sacred in southern Italy during the Counter-Reformation. He has published widely on various aspects of the cultural history of medicine. His book Medical Charlatanism in Early Modern Italy (Oxford University Press, 2006) was awarded the Royal Society of Canada’s Dr Jason A. Hannah medal in 2008 and, in 2012, he was awarded the Salvatore De Renzi International Prize for his contribution to the history of medicine, by the University of Salerno medical school and the Ordine dei Medici of Salerno.
