by Veronica Franco

Veronica Franco was born in Venice in 1546 to a family of cittadini originari, native-born citizens of Venice who made up the city’s middle class. Franco’s mother, Paola Fracassa, had been a courtesan and probably passed her skills down to Veronica, who learned the profession by the mid-1560s. As a cortigiana onesta (honored courtesan), Franco made her living by providing company, conversation, and sexual favors to powerful and wealthy Venetian men as well as to foreign visitors. She was married to a doctor named Paolo Panizza in the early 1560s, but by 1564 she separated from him. Franco later bore six children (only three of whom survived) by different men. In 1575, a terrible outbreak of the bubonic plague struck Venice. When the outbreak finally ended in 1577, over a third of the city’s inhabitants were dead. Thankfully Franco...