The third quarter of the seventeenth century brought considerable changes in the social composition of theatre audiences in Italy. Gone was the exclusiveness of the ducal and academy theatres whose audiences of royalty and nobility attended by invitation only. These were replaced by an audience of a growing bourgeoisie with an ability to pay. As soon as this audience appeared entrepreneurs, quick to recognize the possibilities, opened public playhouses. Theatrical activities became a commercial rather than an artistic, intellectual or political enterprise. Although some vestiges of the past, such as the royal box for important dignitaries, were retained, public theatres soon assumed a more democratic aspect, patronized by audiences who had earned the right to attend by means of personal enterprise rather than by accident or privilege of birth. Foremost in this phenomenon was the city of Venice whose theatrical activities soon became the model. Mercantile families like the Tron, Grimani, Giustinian and Vendramini opened the first public playhouses in the 1630s. Audiences of courtiers and courtesans, Dukes and Doges, Princes and panderers, merchants and magistrates soon became involved in a social mix that would have amazed and scandalised the more formal audiences of earlier times.