This is a preview of the content in our Venice Art & Culture app. Get the app to:
  • Read offline
  • Remove ads
  • Access all content
  • Use the in-app Map to find sites, and add custom locations (your hotel...)
  • Build a list of your own favourites
  • Search the contents with full-text search functionality
  • ... and more!
iOS App Store Google Play

Veronica Franco

Poet and courtesan

Veronica Franco by Tintoretto

Veronica Franco (1546-91), was a famous Renaissance courtesan and poet, the daughter of a courtesan. She had three brothers and was educated along with them, and married briefly to a doctor whom she soon divorced.

Franco was the ideal Venetian Renaissance courtesan: well read, wise, fair and reasonable, a sparkling conversationalist and familiar with the classics, able to play the lute and spinet. She would go on to have six children by different men, three of whom survived childhood.

She began writing poetry, and attended the literary salon of her friend and patron Domenico Venier in the 1570s. In 1575 she published 17 poems in her Terze Rime, about her life as a courtesan, frankly discussing sex and defending women from men who would attack and belittle them; she also challenges the Petrarchian ideal of the distant, fickle, unattainable beloved, promoting conversation between the sexes.

Read the full content in the app
iOS App Store Google Play

Writers

Text © Dana Facaros & Michael Pauls

Image by PD Art