VERONICA FRANCO

Born in 1546
Died in 1591-45 years old
Born & died in Venice

Veronica Franco was the most famous courtesan in sixteenth-century Venice. She was also well known for her poetry, her wit, and her sexual favors -- courtesans were high-class prostitutes whom one did not simply visit for sex but also for conversation and culture.

She is best known in the literary world for thousands of letters found between her and others, as well as poetry within/outside of the letters

LIFE OF VERONICA...

• Franco married in 1560-62, to the physician Paolo Panizza
• She had 6 children (3 died in infancy though)
• In the 1560s-70s she was invited to literature academies
• She was forced into prostituition by her mother
• Her father was bleived to be her teacher or she was homeschooled

Franco became a successful author and pushed for many social reforms. She encouraged the Council of Ten to enforce a 1563 law, making it a crime for mothers to support themselves by prostituting their daughters. She asked the Senate in 1577 to help found a home for unwed mothers and other women who had lost their virtue (Casa del Soccorso). After it was established, though, she did not have a large role in its activities, seeing herself more as someone who might have need of such charitable services rather than as its patron.

The first of her letters found and published was written to Henry III, King of France and the twenty first to Jacopo Tintoretto, the Venetian painter, thanking him for the portrait he did of her.

Some of her most famous letters were to her mother and other mothers who had/were forcing daughters into prostitution.

It is a most wretched thing, contrary to human reason, to subject one’s body and industriousness to a servitude whose very thought is most frightful. To become the prey of so many, at the risk of being despoiled, robbed, killed, deprived in a single day of all that one has acquired from so many over such a long time, exposed to many other dangers of receiving injuries and dreadful contagious diseases; to eat with another’s mouth, sleep with another’s eyes, move according to another’s will, obviously rushing toward the shipwreck of one’s mental abilities and one’s life and body; What greater misery? (Rosenthal, p. 133)

Untitled Slide