Latrines and Sewers for the Sick Poor: Waste Management in Italian Renaissance Hospitals

Designed by the Florentine architect Filarete, the Ospedale Maggiore (1456) in Milan is considered today a model example of Renaissance hospital architecture. Besides reaching a new scale of monumentality, the architect’s innovative use of the cruciform plan promoted several therapeutic and sanitary novelties in the structure, including an elaborate sewer system known as the destri. Intended to prevent the formation of putrid waters and ‘corrupt airs’ inside the hospital building by facilitating the removal of human waste from the infirmaries, the destri received significant attention in Filarete’s Treatise on Architecture (ca. 1460-64). Despite their evident importance for the architect, scholars of hospital architecture have focused on the cruciform plan’s quick spread throughout southern Europe, while the circulation of infrastructural innovations connected to the design has not received much attention. Bridging this gap in scholarship, I will consider the potential adoption of the cruciform plan and its associated technological novelties in the construction of the Ospedale di Messer Gesù Cristo (1474) in Venice, a hospital originally envisioned as a solution to the Venetian refugee and poverty crisis of the late fifteenth century. While documentary evidence points to exchanges between Venice and Milan, the existence of a system similar to the destri at the Venetian hospital has not been firmly established. Building on the impact of the Ospedale Maggiore and contemporary understandings of health, this paper will consider the contributions of the Venetian context to our knowledge of waste management in Renaissance hospital architecture.