The state of the Italian economy, or economies, through our period has been much debated, notably whether there was a decline or shift in the seventeenth century, as part of a wider debate about the shift of economic leadership from the Mediterranean to the north-west Atlantic.1 There is the interlinked argument from Braudel and Immanuel Wallerstein that world economies shifted their ‘superville’ epicentres from Venice and Antwerp in the early and mid-sixteenth century to Amsterdam at the close, and then London from the later seventeenth century. I favour the view that, while Italy (notably Venice, Genoa, Milan and Florence), in the course of the seventeenth century did lose leadership in many economic matters, such as international trade in pepper and spices, in shipbuilding and capital investment and insurance, there were some compensatory shifts and gains, and no absolute decline, economically or culturally. Standards of living, physical and of mentalité, should be more important than economic league tables; as Braudel stressed; ‘from the point of view of quality of life... I would certainly rather have lived in Tuscany, than in Spain under Philip II or even in France under Louis XIV’.2 Here I will outline the main trends as they affect urban and rural society, highlighting those affecting rural society’s vitality or stagnation.
The mortality crises associated with plague and other epidemics of the Black Death period produced a major drop in population across most of Italy with depopulation of many rural areas, and a disinvestment in land on the part of urban investors. Surviving rural populations could, however, use the shortage of labour to improve their incomes and standard of living, and the conditions under which they worked the land. As the fifteenth century unfolded urban and rural populations rose, surplus urban wealth was reinvested in the land and urban dwellers consolidated rural properties, dispossessing smallholders, or renegotiating share-cropping and leasing contracts to the detriment of the contadini.
In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries economic vitality and wealth was heavily urban, as Franco Angiolini (1996) stresses. Michel de Montaigne touring Italy in 1580–81, noted the wealth of many very populous Italian cities and their inhabitants (in contrast to native France); and was aware of serious brigandry in rural areas, testimony to poverty and chaos outside the cities (though of course there were many banished townspeople as well as disgruntled peasants in the bandit gangs). By the eighteenth century, Grand Tour travellers were less complimentary about urban vitality (outside a few pleasurable places like Venice and Rome); by then Italy was hardly an urban manufacturing economy, the Italian economies had their strengths (relatively weakened in comparison with western and north-western Europe) based on agricultural development, and some associated rural industries. The shifts had taken place as a result of crises through the seventeenth century.3
The fifteenth and early-sixteenth century saw attempts to create and consolidate territorial states, especially centred on Florence, Venice, Milan and the Papacy in Rome, while petty princes, military condottieri and lesser communes strove to avoid central domination. Such struggles could disrupt economies through the effects of military conflicts, civil unrest and sieges. Where power was more effectively concentrated in key cities economic leadership might pass to a narrow elite in one city prominent in conspicuous consumption, to the detriment of lesser cities or towns. Within Tuscany, where Florence sought to consolidate a territorial state (Republican or Medicean), Volterra and San Gimignano for example suffered by the sixteenth century, though Prato, Pescia and Borgo San Sepolcro seemed to have gained relatively in population and prosperity since the fourteenth century.4 Milan failed to assert its economic pre-eminence within Lombardy; Vigevano, Cremona and Lodi gained in size and economic strength by the sixteenth century. Parma and Piacenza similarly improved, though they were to be lost to the Lombard state by the mid sixteenth century, as were Bergamo and Crema, which became part of the Venetian Republic. The continuation of a multifarious urban scene in Lombardy, backed by the princely policy of the Visconti and Sforza to favour seignieurial aristocrats (and ex-soldiers), possibly helped spread wealth across the region, and encouraged a widespread urban investment in rural properties.
This trend continued through the sixteenth century in most of Italy. The Italian wars, threats from the Turks in the Mediterranean, the expansion of European contacts around the world, the discovery of new sources of supply of silver, gold, spices, luxury silks, etc., all had adverse effects on Italian manufacturing in key areas and Italian overseas trade through the sixteenth century. However, there may have compensating trading developments within Italy once war effects diminished or ceased. While wool manufacturing declined in Florence and then Venice (from the 1610s), silks, glassware, pottery, furniture, musical instruments and book production developed their output.
Through the sixteenth century Italy probably produced most of its own manufactured goods, and expanded the range; a diversity of imported raw materials (cotton, silks, materials for dyes, soda for glass) fed the Italian manufacturing industries. As Richard Goldthwaite (1993) argues, the increased enthusiasm for conspicuous consumption by the rich fed the expansion of luxury goods. Venetian elaboration on dyeing, with government-fostered reorganisation of the industry from the late fifteenth century, boosted demand for ever more varied clothing, bedding and hangings. Jewellery, glass and furniture became more elaborate, fashion conscious and expensive – and repeated sumptuary legislation to curb the expenses had limited effects. Venetian practice, and printed publicity in the mid-sixteenth century, boosted the cosmetics and luxury soap industries.5 Capital earned by leading banking families, particularly among the Genoese, who invested in the wider Spanish Empire, fuelled both urban manufacturing and new land investment. Goldthwaite’s argument that the rich got richer applied to cities like Venice, Rome, Genoa, Cremona, Bari and Lecce as well as to individuals. There were losers among cities that used to thrive on manufactures (Brescia in metals, Perugia in cloth and leather goods), among patricians, small wool producers and artisans, and among many peasants.
In assessing variable economic fortunes, one of the key variables was the extent to which capital was reinvested in land and then put to use with some entrepreneurial initiative and efficiency – as in parts of the Veneto, but not in much of Umbria or Campania. There was a continuing investment in land by private urban families, ecclesiastical organisations, hospitals. But there were complicated variables as to how this affected those in the small towns and rural areas, which tended to see a population expansion. Entrepreneurial investment in land, with irrigation schemes, planting of mulberries and fruit trees and expansion of dairy farming, could prove beneficial for the rural population in providing variety in the sources of income and employment (including paid work for women in silk-producing areas for example), and bring some compensation for the growing population pressures on the land, the inflation of basic food prices and the lowering of real wages for the landless labourers. In other areas the re-investment in land by the elites meant changes from labour-intensive arable to pasturage, driving peasants off the land and into cities like Rome and Naples where (without major expansion in urban industries) they swelled the ranks of the poor. Changes in fiscal policy through the sixteenth century may often have allowed the urban elites to lessen their own burdens (and so spend on luxuries, art patronage or land investment) and pass the burden to rural tax payers, whether through taxes directly imposed on individual families, or mediated through levies on rural communities. Resulting indebtedness further diminished the numbers of small proprietors, and the stock of common land, and expanded the numbers of sharecroppers (as in Tuscany or Umbria), and of coloni working on large farms and latifundia estates (as in Lombardy or much of the Kingdom of Naples). Expropriation and exploitation of peasants was the main characteristic of the period through much of Italy. The result could also be an increase in rural violence, brigandage and banditry.
In counterbalancing some arguments about economic decline in the South, some commentators have pointed to the growth of fairs and large markets, and the expansion in size and wealth of southern towns continuing through the sixteenth century and later (as with the Puglian cities of Bari, Lecce, Taranto, Matera and Barletta), assisted by capital investments from Venetians, Genoese and Tuscans.6 The existence of multiple fairs should have benefited rural areas, giving rural inhabitants a greater variety of goods, incentives to experience urban society, if briefly during the periods of fairs, and knock-on effects (legal or illegal) of having merchants and their supporters travelling through lesser villages.
From the 1590s the Italian economy is judged to have lost pre-eminence in long-distance trade (especially in spices and oriental luxuries), in associated banking and insurance expertise and profits. The Dutch and English entered the Mediterranean carrying grain supplies from the Baltic to cope with the 1590s’ food crises, and failed to leave. The English in particular took over as transporters of goods in and out of Italy, especially using the port of Livorno. They joined the Turks, Berbers, Uskoks and others in depredating Italian, especially Venetian, shipping. Italy declined as an exporter of manufactured goods, especially woollen textiles and metallurgy. Maintaining high standards of production, and protecting reasonably high wages as in Venice, Italian cloths lost out to cheaper if less durable Dutch and English materials. But equally problematic was how Venetians could prevent competitors, notably the English, cheating by passing off cheap and shoddy cloths as Venetian by using false stamp marks in the Levant market which still appreciated high quality, if expensive, cloths, or stop them counterfeiting soap in a similar way. The French tried deceiving the world with imitation Venetian glass, when they could not bribe or cajole Venetian glass-blowers to emigrate.7 Banking crises on the eve of and through the start of war in Germany from 1618, the subsequent disruption of overland trade to and through the German states, the increased taxation imposed on its Italian possessions by the Spanish government to finance its war operations, all contributed to difficulties for Italian trade and manufacturing. Typhus and plague through the 1620s and early 1630s in northern Italy, and major war activities associated especially with the struggle for the Duchy of Mantua, brought catastrophic drops in population, especially in the large cities like Venice and Milan, followed by major problems in economic production whether of manufactured goods or rural produce.
Recent work suggests that after the mid-seventeenth century the overall picture in northern Italy is less gloomy than once alleged.8 Lesser towns and rural areas picked up what was lost in great cities like Milan and Venice. Out of war could come benefits for armaments makers in Brescia and northern valleys, where manufacturing was added to basic mining activities. While Italians, especially Venetians lost out in major sea transport, land routes for silk exports, for example, remained active, and transport costs were not that significantly different. Cities like Bologna and Milan gained by the willingness of Venetians and others to use land routes. A post-plague shortage of labour briefly saw better conditions in wages for rural survivors; many city or feudal-elite families in Lombardy went into crisis, and were forced to sell properties. After a shake-out, surviving old landowning families and accumulating new ones took over; they invested in agricultural development with a keener sense of profit; they more ruthlessly re-negotiated contracts with peasants and communes, who became more suppressed. But in economic terms this released profits that from the eighteenth century funded new industrial development, especially in silks. If Venice again lost out in silk production, into the eighteenth century Bergamo or Vicenza gained, learning from the Dutch among others. Later Turin and other parts of Piedmont moved towards a more capital intensive and factory-like production.
The economic shifts in the seventeenth century away from the major manufacturing cities led to more rural-based processing and manufacturing, providing wider sources of income for families, especially with additional female labour. So the countryside became the mainstay of Italian economies, through the production of food and raw materials, and the processing of them. C. M. Belfanti (1993) has stressed that the process of ‘rural decentralisation of manufacture’, or proto-industrialisation, was under way from the mid sixteenth century in some northern areas, such as the Duchy of Mantua, the Republic of Genoa, or the Bresciano under the Venetian Republic. Proto-industrialisation regionally could be the product of merchant entrepreneurial vitality, or occasioned by desperation in city and countryside. Mantuan and Genoese merchants, facing strict city guild restrictions and high labour costs, shifted various processing and manufacturing activities to produce knitwear in the Mantuan contado, or velvets through the Genoese Riviera di Levante (centred on Zoagli near Rapallo). The plague epidemic of 1579–80 caused many Genoese silk craftsmen to flee Genoa; they remained in the inland villages to create a rural silk processing and weaving industry that survived many vicissitudes till the eighteenth century. Small landholders also became weavers.
Poor agricultural land tempted urban investors to develop rural industries using cheap labour free from city guild controls, especially if there was a good water supply, and accessible raw materials. The Bergamo area with its valleys saw the development of middle quality woollen cloths and iron. In 1620 the region had 84 mines, 11 blast furnaces and 100 forges.9 The valleys of the Bresciano similarly had rural iron production; the Camonica valley kept up 90–100 forges throughout the period from the 1560s to the 1780s, producing pots, horseshoes and cuirasses. The Trompia valley manufactured firearms, agricultural implements, wires and nails, while the Sabbia valley produced steel.
The western shore of Lake Garda, poorly situated for food production, developed flax spinning. Salò merchants organised raw supplies from across Lombardy, distributing them for semi-manufacturing by peasants through the winter to be finished back in Salò. The rural inhabitants could also earn from paper making, and minor iron workings, with 70–80 forges, producing nails and hardware for Venice and other cities.
In various parts of the Veneto, northern Papal State, and Lombardy enclaves, combining poor food agriculture, with feudal privileges, freedom from guild controls or with government tax concessions could develop profitable rural industries: cotton manufacturing in Lombard areas around Gallarete and Busto Arizio; cordage and hemp sailcloth in the Cento region between Bologna and Ferrara; hat making from willow shavings in the Pio family’s little seigneury of Carpi; hemp production in the Bolognese contado areas around Budrio and Castel S. Pietro. Thus rural industry could be of considerable importance for the overall Italian economy, and for the configurations of work and income in the land of the ‘peasant’. Major city organisers put a significant amount of work and income into poverty-stricken rural areas, and continued to profit themselves when the major city manufacturing faltered. The numbers involved are hardly established yet; but it was reported that there were 10,000 iron workers in the Camonica valley in 1609–10; over 7000 people were producing 60,000 cloths in Busto Arizio in 1767. At the end of the century a Friulian entrepreneur, Del Fabbro, employed 11,000 weavers on looms producing flax and hemp cloth, and 18,000 women were involved in the domestic silk industry in the Como area. Rural families thus had variable sources of income from different skills, were interlocked with an urban economy and international trade and were in contact with urban dwellers and urban material culture.
For the debate about shifts in the Italian economies from the last third of the seventeenth century, Gigliola Pagano De Divitiis’ vision of the scene through the activities of English merchants and the views of English merchants, is valuable.10 Within Italy the north–south divide or contrast was accentuated, whereby the south provided agricultural produce, and the centre-north remained the manufacturing area, even if the locales changed (as above). English merchants were primarily interested in importing (from Naples and Puglian ports like Gallipoli and Bari) olive oil for cloth processing and to a lesser extent soap making. They obtained currants directly from Venetian dependencies like Zante and Cephalonia, from Puglia (which in part remained in the Venetian economic sector) or indirectly through Venice. The English also imported, whether by sea or by land, silk threads and silk manufactures, derived from Tuscany, Lombardy and Piedmont. They took full advantage of Livorno, which the Grand Dukes of Tuscany developed as a modern port, (effectively a ‘free port’, though not officially so until 1675). The English ships in the winter months largely brought fish to Livorno and Naples, for distribution across Italy thereafter – smoked herring, salted pilchards, cod, salmon, predominantly for Lenten fasting. Here English ‘fish-boats’ were replacing fish supplies that had come overland from or through France. Some English woollen cloth entered Italy, but seemingly the Spanish industry suffered much more than the Italian from this competition.
In broader economic terms the Italians, especially the Venetians, lost out as carriers of the imports and exports, though by the late seventeenth century small coastal vessels from Venice regained some share of the carrying of olive oil. Livorno residents developed insurance expertise at the expense of Venetians. In port facility terms, Livorno’s gain was often at the expense of Genoa as well as the already silting-up port of Pisa, though Genoa fought back in the 1660s. Except at the height of war activity a considerable amount of northern Italian exporting went overland, with Bologna, Verona and Milan being major interchange points. Venetians and others argued that it was safer, and hardly much different in costs, to send silks overland as far as the Netherlands ports. This lessened the impact of English control of shipping, and complicates assessments of northern Italian trading, especially in lesser towns.
While the English sought to compete with Italians in producing silk threads and manufactured silk cloths (which were very fashionable in England throughout much of the sixteenth century), they failed to learn certain secrets, such as spinning organzine silk – which continued to come from Bergamo, Bologna, parts of Piedmont and Sicily. Florentine (and wider Tuscan), silks or Genoese velvets held up quite well in the new competition. Venetian silks lost out against the English, but competed in the Levant market (even against English fraudulent activities in stamping their cheaper and poor quality goods with the Lion of St Mark). Some Venetians (and English observers) were aware of the dilemma of either maintaining quality and standards for their best Levant markets, or cheapening their production to compete in the more fickle and insecure English (and presumably French) markets. The Venetian secretary in London in 1672, Girolamo Alberti, warned that Florentines had recently made the mistake of trying to compete with inferior silks; they had lost their market and their reputation, and the city’s looms that had been adapted now lay idle. The Florentines were seeking to replace the southern Italian manufacturing industries, used to producing light silks, and may not have been quite as unsuccessful as Alberti implied, though his advice for Venetians may have still been valid. They wanted to maintain a variety of target markets, while the Florentines were almost entirely geared to England. When England had been hit by plague in 1665, with its disruption of commerce, Florence had been badly affected.11 As long as Italy could produce raw silk, various kinds of silk threads, and manufactured silk cloths, garments and hangings, the city and dependent rural workers could prosper.
A recent emphasis by early modern European historians on consumerism and material culture has widened the horizons and targets of economic history, moving beyond capital, raw materials and major manufacturing which might be more readily quantified.12 We are encouraged to look more carefully, through inventories and testaments especially, to what people possessed in their homes, what they wore, what they ate and drank beyond necessities. Alison Smith’s recent study (1998) of Verona inventories revealingly reproduces that of the movable goods in Count Gasparo Verità’s house in 1578, but warns that clothes enclosed in chests will probably be under-recorded. There is little doubt that consumer demand increased through our period. The consumer revolution from the later seventeenth century has been noted for England and France. Less study has been made of Italian inventories, but visual evidence might suggest that northern and central Italian cities shared in the rising consumer demand, and little momentum was lost from the consumerist pull that Goldthwaite saw as helping generate the ‘Renaissance’. Shops and retail outlets both in large cities, and smaller ones like Prato, we know expanded in numbers and became more elaborate, presumably responding to desires, and encouraging demand. The desires for better, more fashionable clothing and footwear, for more comfortable seating and bedding, for hangings, pictures and prints on the wall, for food varieties, may all have started in the elite secular houses, but repercussions are found in the gloomy seventeenth century in rural areas, or the cells of monks and nuns supposedly disdaining worldly goods and elaborate foods, as well as in the inventoried houses of lesser Venetian artisans.13 The second-hand market allowed goods and desires to be passed on. Those who start with the good second-hand are likely to aspire to the new, so the economy moves.
Physical mobility was extensive in and out of cities and villages within a few kilometres, but also over great distances through the peninsula, or across the Alps, and over the seas. All levels of society could be involved from patrician ambassadors to shepherds leading their flocks over considerable distances. There were well-to-do women who moved through marriage strategies, and humbler ones who flocked to cities to be servants or prostitutes; hopefully trying to make money or contacts in preparation for marriage, or dolefully fleeing some disaster or disgrace, or seeking errant husbands. For some, regular movement was part of their livelihood: seasonal workers on harvests, the myriad of ‘officials’ sent out to administer justice, collect taxes or rents, transport goods, peddle wares, sell potions and quack remedies or round up criminals and bandits. Some had skills to sell and sought a better employment situation, or were enticed to move by governments or merchants seeking to develop silk making, glass blowing, or ironmongery, and patrons (individual or institutional) seeking a well-reputed artist or musician to enhance their prestige and delight their fancy. Many moved voluntarily and under legitimate economic imperatives. Others were driven out of city or village, as undesirable Jews, prostitutes or beggars who could not claim long-term residency and protection. Courts (or political opponents) condemned significant numbers to permanent banishment or short-term exile, while even more fled fearing a court because of a crime committed or alleged, considering it unwise to stay in an attempt to prove innocence – given the vagaries of justice. Some moved as part of a family, but most travelled as individuals.
The interchanges between contado and city were unbalanced, in numbers and mental outlook, and not necessarily welcomed. Urban dwellers could despise the caricatured dumb and dangerous peasant/contadino. The contadino might fear most people coming from the neighbouring town, whether as somebody demanding payments of taxes, rents and dues, or as a bandito seeking refuge from city magistrates and police. The Bologna tribunals of the Torrone and Della Plebe record city officials making visitations round the contado to check on bandits and criminals, or on whether locals were trading and crafting under genuine licences, using correct measures, preparing food supplies for themselves and the city in a proper way.14 As parish priests from the later sixteenth century were arguably better educated (in towns), and more resident, they could bring back to the contado different ideas, tastes, religious and social practices that would have an impact whether favourable or distrusted.
The Bergamo province provided many migrants in our period, escaping the poverty of mountainous areas. In popular literature, such as the short stories of Bandello and Straparola in the 1550s, such Bergamaschi were coarse, money-grubbing and sponging on others. They provided manual labourers for Brescia and Verona. But more surprisingly people from the Valdimagna area of the province ran about three-quarters of the shops down in Ancona in 1596. In the eighteenth century skilled workers from the iron mines, now underfinanced, moved to mines on Elba, in Piedmont, Lombardy and Switzerland, and remitted profits to families back home. The image, and reality, of the Bergamaschi abroad becomes complex.15
Arguably through the period the inter-relationships became more beneficial as well as more complicated. The urban image of the rural scene (if not of all its inhabitants) may have become more positive, as a greater proportion of the urban population went backwards and forwards between areas and read about the rural scene in literature (based on a classical idyll) that romanticised the simple peasant and rustic life, as the concept of villa life spread.16 A renewed interest from the sixteenth century in active investment in, and exploitation of, the resources of the countryside by well-to-do urban residents changed the complexion of that countryside, but also attitudes. By the eighteenth century, at least in parts of northern Italy, the urban involvement in changing the scenery, through terracing and irrigation, but also in trying to educate the ‘peasantry’, brought even more interchange and involvement. More urban dwellers came to see the rural air and diet as healthier, so sent more children to country wetnurses – however disastrously in practice. While historians tend to be aware of movement from country to town, they have been less aware of those who emigrated to the countryside to improve their position. In the early eighteenth century Anguillara in the Agro Romano absorbed a significant number of immigrants, mainly from Rome, though artisans also came from Lombardy, Venice and the Marches. Both elite and plebeian families were seeking land or salaried work; many were marginalised by the communal council or a confraternity, and marriage was an agency to gain both acceptance and land, through a dowry.17
Commerce and those involved with it provided much interconnection between city and contado. For example Donato Ferrario from Pantigliate moved from that part of Lombardy into Milan, possibly with some expertise in metal work since in 1403 the city gave him a post scrutinising money makers. He settled in the Porta Nuova area and (aided by his Milanese wife) became involved in a whole range of commercial activities and investments, including animal husbandry, water mills and textiles. He utilised many different people who moved back and forth between city, near and more distant countryside operating his enterprises, conducting merchandise and supervising his investments.18 Mills provided a major contact point between contadini and townspeople, and the miller – when not threatened by reluctant tax payers or those worried about fraud – might be the communicator of urban ways, and novel ideas. ‘Cheese and Worms’ Menocchio was not the only miller challenging religious orthodoxy in the Veneto.19
In some cities the official organisations catered for guild members who might work both in the city and in the contado; and recognised the different remunerations that might be involved. In 1549 the Florentine guild of Linaioli (of linen workers, but also for second-hand clothes dealers [rigattieri ], sellers of old-iron [ ferravecchij ], tailors and mattress makers) allowed those wishing to exercise the different aspects of the guild in the contado to pay half-fees to the guild. It also ruled that women who had previously been allowed to operate as tailors, cutting, sewing, and keeping open shops (botteghe aperte) as well as dealing privately, without paying guild fees, should now have to contribute. They paid less than the men did; and paid very little if they worked from home rather than from a shop.20
The inter-dependence of urban and rural life was enhanced by the development of proto-industrialisation, whereby various manufacturing processes leading to the production of cloth in particular were put out from the cities into the countryside, partly to avoid strict guild regulations and utilise cheaper, often female, labour. It brought more sophisticated production techniques into rural economies, instead of just taking raw produce away. Urban agents more frequently visited the countryside promising work. They may have exploited cheap labour in comparison with guild regulated labour in cities, but also brought a higher standard of living for the rural dwellers, with knock-on effects in consumer terms. A greater awareness of what might improve living conditions and comforts (initially to be bought new or secondhand from the city), might lead a small local community to create its own imitations.21
As part of the mobile scene within Italy and European-wide were the long-distance pedlars. For obvious reasons our knowledge of them and their activities is usually limited. Some were destitute individuals who picked up various cheap wares and travelled around seeking to sell them – haberdashery and trinkets, prints, pamphlets and books. Those peddling devotional images might also provide magical healing remedies; or also be cantastorie, people who went round telling or singing stories, spreading accounts of monstrous births and strange event as prognostications, and peddling images of them, or copies of the stories. Pedlars in fact or under accusation operated on the fringes of legality, connected with smuggling and thieving, as discovered through police records in Tuscany. They might link up with city guilds, as with Turin tailors, to handle banned and smuggled fabrics, for mutual advantage. For some pedlars this precarious mobile life was their whole existence, for others a seasonal activity, supplementing the family income, while for others it might be the path to permanent emigration. The more successful became small merchants operating a sort of network of mountain village shops. Other pedlars were part of a well-developed network, organised by (sometimes related to) families in various cities; and they might trade in more substantial and profitable goods – most notably, by the eighteenth century, books and pamphlets, legal or illegal. Family networks organised the peddling of goods between northern Italy, France, Switzerland and even remote Scotland. These families might operate over several generations, and use marriage strategies to extent their networks. Early seventeenth century documents record the Bittot family, originally from Montagny in Tarantaise, that operated routes between Venice and Lyons, Lyons and Haarlem, Haarlem and Gdansk, Gdansk and Venice again. Some years later the Brentano family emerged in the Lake Como area, with branches in Gnosso, Troccia, Cimaroli and Tremezzo. They started in the late sixteenth century selling spices and citrus fruit. They penetrated into Basel and Frankfurt where they were allowed to open a shop in 1678. By the eighteenth century another noted international family, the Gravier, with key figures in Genoa and Rome, organised the circulation of books and pamphlets of all kinds, but could also deal with gloves. A lesser branch based in Turin diversely peddled haberdashery through the winter, or dealt with the supply of mules. Earlier, in the later sixteenth and the seventeenth century the village of Pontremoli in the Tuscan Apennines was a centre for peddling books and pamphlets, in conjunction with printers from the Duchy of Parma. Such selling operations point to a mobility of people and ideas across Italy and Europe more widely.22
A specialist kind of pedlar was the charlatan and mountebank, (ciarlatano and cerretano). The English implications of these terms are con-men, tricksters, the travel-ling salesman or much patter and little honesty. While in Italian from the fifteenth century the words have similar implications, we can also here be dealing with licensed pedlars of powders, potions, unguents and elixirs. They were an element in the medical profession, with senior medical officials seeking to control their activities, and allow for the spreading through city and countryside of medical remedies; though a vice-protomedico in the Papal State in 1632 might still describe a ciarlatano as one of ‘those people who appear in the square and sell various things by means of entertainments and buffoonery’.23 While superior medics despised them, and city officials expelled them like vagabonds in plague crises, some were well-educated, and not much different from apothecaries and physicians with a more respected and permanent position in urban society. They were just as likely to produce curative remedies; and Venetian health officials were ready to sell their remedies for plague. In their selling techniques they drew on the theatre, such as the commedia dell’arte, and were part of the popular entertainment of the cities and villages. Sellers of a remedy called orvietan, supposedly invented in the late sixteenth century by a Lupi of Orvieto as an antidote (for whatever real or imaginary illness the seller might select), became renowned from southern Italy to Paris and London. Serious sellers sought government licences to sell and perform on stages. Girolamo Ferranti of Naples, and his son were among the most famous travelling charlatans. In 1616 Gregorio, who had a shop in Rome, was selling in Florence, with the assistance of entertainers, including an attractive woman, according to a printed news-sheet (Avviso):
The amiable Vettoria, cleanly and neatly dressed as a young boy, has large numbers of people running to her, with the somersaults she does, her divine dancing and singing, such a sweet and beautiful sight, that the enchantment touches and lulls everyone, so that, sighing, they cry: alas, alas my heart, what is this? And most of all certain old men, who look at her with mouths agape, because they would like to flirt with her and partake of that tasty morsel.24
Subsequent chapters are divided for convenience between rural and urban society, but it should never be forgotten that there was much inter-connection at first or second hand. Urban and rural economies were linked to their mutual advantage, whether through major investors, or these minor pedlars or performers. International trade, and urban economies were the main motors for economic growth, the sources of Italian economic domination in the later medieval and early modern period up to the early seventeenth century, but when these sectors declined relative to parts of northern and western Europe, some investments and productive activity moved into the smaller cities and rural areas, so spreading material benefits there. The urban elites continued to exploit the contado, but some benefits accrued to the latter. Shifts and adaptations were made easier because the rural scene in much of Italy was already in itself diverse, and experienced significant mobility, even in the supposedly monocultural agriculture of the south, as we shall see.