Orphans and Musicians in Venice

By the late Middle Ages, at least one European city had taken steps to solve some of the ills associated with poverty and a rising population. Unwanted babies may have appeared every day, but they were very well looked after. Venice, even in the time of its incipient decadence, had evolved a splendid, practical and economic solution to the age-old problem. Everybody in trouble knew exactly where to go.

Down-and-outs, or ‘derelicts’, for example, could repair to the Derelitti, later known as the Ospedaletto, opposite the church of SS Giovanni e Paolo, and which from 1674 onwards was a building of remarkable Baroque extravagance. In the early eighteenth century, they could study violin-playing behind those Baroque façades with a lady teacher known simply as Anna-Maria, whom the French lawyer-scholar Charles de Brosses described in 1739 as being technically on a par with Giuseppe Tartini, the great Paduan virtuoso.