In 1587 and 1588 Alessandro Vignarchi, a peddler in the Tuscan countryside, was traveling across the mountainous area northeast of Florence. Alessandro was selling a wide array of products: grains, wine, cheese, but most importantly, woolen and linen cloth. He was part of a family of retail traders, that had been operating in the area since at least 1570, with their main activity based in San Godenzo.

Alessandro spent several years traveling throughout the different valleys, meeting people that not only came from the Tuscan Apennines , but also from the countryside of Lucca, from the nearby Emilia region, and from the Chianti area. With his activity he reached a few remote villages that still today are in the middle of the Apennine woods. 

Alessandro’s activity, and that of his family, is testified by a series of account books that are organized using single entry bookkeeping, which chronologically report the debts and credits of the peddler, recording the transactions in the name of the creditors/debtors.

These books will be the basis of my new research, which will focus on consumption patterns, information networks, and fashion culture among non-urban populations in the early modern period. The Vignarchi case study, besides being an interesting family saga by itself, deals with several historiographical issues. Firstly, fashion historians have showed how trends and fashions spread horizontally and vertically across social groups. However, it remains unclear which information networks and carriers were diffusing trends and fashions among lower social groups. Secondly, the peddler’s activity is also connected to more recent historiographical debates in mobility and migration studies. Thanks to this peculiar source, it will be possible to address issues related to the identity of buyers, the role of peddlers in the spread of fashion, and the influence of the city on the countryside. It also helps us to understand the role of geographical networks on habits of consumption. Moreover, peddlers played an important role in the creation of informal social relations, thanks to their action in settling credits and debits among their clients.

The role and relevance of the itinerant trade has been well-studied, particularly for Northwestern Europe and Italy, mostly for the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Places such as the countryside and the mountains have been left behind in research, while a preference has been accorded to urban areas. While most European cities provide rich documentation of their retail systems during the ancién regime, the countryside and mountainous areas suffer from a lack of research, in particular for the early modern period. This is due to a lack of sources for several of these regions, but also the historiographical idea that the landscape of consumption in these territories was significantly less developed with respect to consumer culture.

However, understanding peripheral areas is as important as understanding the consumption patterns and retail trade of cities like Florence or Venice, since in this period the biggest share of the population lived in non-urban areas. And, at least in Italy, this demographic distribution did not change until the second half of the nineteenth century, when the country started to industrialize.

Peddlers and itinerant traders are figures that are always difficult to define precisely. It is difficult to find, including for urban areas, sources that may shed light on their roles, functions, and movements since they very often moved along the borders of the different economic systems that characterized the Italian regions. Despite the difficulties in following their exact activities and displacements, these traders had a fundamental importance as suppliers to non-urban areas, for the exchange of small goods and textiles, the circulation of news, and for the connections they created between areas. Interesting, for instance, is the role of itinerant traders in the labor market and work mobility described in the work of Laurence Fontaine.

The development of this professional figure was probably a result of a context characterized by people moving seasonally from one place to another, and in a situation characterized by rural pluri-activity (that was linked to the issue of subsistence in several areas of the peninsula).  A gradual process caused some of the rural workers to transform into itinerant traders.

Itinerant traders were, of course, involved on a more general level in regional and supra-regional trade, since they had strong ties with city merchants, the main suppliers for their goods. Peddlers not only sold their products to peasants in the most remote valleys of the Apennines, but also attended fairs and weekly markets that were held at the foot of the mountains, and directly supplied from the city’s merchants. In the case of Alessandro, because of his strong ties with Francesco Vignarchi, a cousin who was already a retailer of cloth, we can assume he infrequently needed to travel down to Florence to buy the merchandise himself.

Peddlers, in the context of the Apennine area, had a strategic role since they connected different valleys and villages, spreading news (of different sorts) and products (particularly locally manufactured goods, as in Alessandro’s case pannibigi casentini– an heavy wool cloth from Stia – and wheat, which was insufficiently produced in the mountain area). In this sense, itinerant traders had a fundamental role in supplying the valleys with these vital goods. And, hopefully this research, now in its initial stage, will shed light on the activity of Alessandro Vignarchi and his family and help us understand what was happening in the mountains surrounding Florence, one of the most fashionable cities of the early modern age.

Finally, this research may show that peddlers were responding to the demand for flashy items by inhabitants of the Apennines.  It is unlikely that these rural people did not have any sense of fashion, since, as a trimming master in mid-eighteenth-century Turin said: “Ama il contadino la comparsa, ma le facoltà non s’adattano al di lui desiderio”.[1]

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[1]The peasant loves to appear, but his wealth doesn’t match his desire. 

After a year, with the last days spent in Siena in late October, the work in the Italian archives is complete. It has been a long and intense, but rewarding work, and it has given us great results.

The research work started in October 2017 at the Venice State archive, where it was possible to find a large number of documents. Here different collections were used: notarial and court collections contained post-mortem probate inventories that were requested by family members or appointed tutors in order to estimate the inheritance. In Venice I was able to find more than 600 inventories, of which 450 ca. will be included in the database (we are excluding mercers, goldsmiths and other high rank professions).

At the beginning of 2018, the research focused on Florence. I spent there 3 months doing research at the archive, particularly in the collection of the Magistrato dei Pupilli. As for the Giudici di Petizionin Venice, this institution had the aim to certify inheritances. However, while in Venice the Petizion courtrecorded all the inheritances, the Magistrati dei pupillifocused in granting a tutor and the management of the inheritance for the children. Probably for this reason, Florence had consistently less inventories recorded for artisans. Here I was able to gather 206 inventories, of which 85 could be used in the final database. However, despite the lower number of inventories, Florence is precious for all the account books that are preserved there. From the medieval to the contemporary age, it is possible to find almost any type of account book produced by traders, artisans, hospitals and other institutions at the State Archive. In our case, I was able to find a few account books that will help us better analyze and understand the data from the inventories. These books are usually journals written by peddlers, shoemakers and mercers, and they record all the transactions made in their shops or stands.

The final stage of the research was carried out in Siena. For this city, I could profit from the experience of Paula Hohti. Part of the material for the 16^thcentury had indeed already been identified by Paula, and my work here consisted of continuing the analysis of the collection, the Curia del Placito. The Curiain Siena had the same role as the Magistrato dei Pupilliin Florence. However, Siena was more fruitful from the point of view of the artisan’s inventories, since we were able to gather 203 inventories of which 185 were used for the database. To these, it is possible to add the auction records of the cases where the Sienese government had authorized the tutor to liquidize some of the assets of their underage protégés. These lists of goods—despite being very often partial—are particularly useful in understanding the value of items, since they report the selling price, as well the items that were chosen for being sold, thus considered as a reserve of value.

As it is possible to see from Chart 1, the distribution of the inventories is not equal, and this is of course due to the typology of the collections, to the role of the institutions that recorded the inventories, and to the population and size that characterized the cities, all of which will be considered when comparing them. Not equal is also the temporal distribution of the artisan’s inventories, which are of course linked to health issues among the population, as well as to local events or to problems related to the preservation of the documents. (see Charts 2, 3 and 4).

 

What’s next?

After this first phase of archival research, it is time now to implement the database! The inventories from Siena and Florence have been already transcribed, but Venice is still an open field. So…let’s get out the reading glasses and make sure that by next spring also the inventories from the Serenissima will be fully transcribed. Stay tuned!

In May I had the possibility to participate to the 2018 Datini conference, or “Settimana”, in Prato. The theme of the conference – which is named after a 14^th century merchant Francesco Datini, and celebrated its 50^th anniversary – was “Maritime Networks as a Factor of European Integration”. The aim was to promote comparative analysis and to go beyond the isolated study of single economic systems, and understand the integrative role played by maritime connections around Europe and the Mediterranean, taking Fernand Braudel’s concept of Méditerranée as a starting point.

My paper, titled All roads lead to Venice. The role of public navigation in the Renaissance, discussed the system of trade which Venice developed from 13^th century onwards, and which was based on the integration of private and public navies. This integrated system, which reached its apogee during the 15^th century, helped Venice to become one of the main gateways for the long-distance trade between Asia and Europe during the medieval and early modern period. Thanks to the severaltrade routes that crossed the Mediterranean and the Atlantic Ocean, Venetian merchants were able to import oriental spices, expensive textiles, and other Asiatic goods to Venice and Europe. Equally, European manufactured goods were exported to the Middle Eastern ports, where they were transported to continental Asia.

Beside all the academic events, the conference is also a meeting point for European economic historians, and offers the possibility to attend social events, such as concerts and dinners. An interesting side note is that in 2020 the focus of the conference will be “Fashion as an economic engine: process and product innovation, commercial strategies, consumer behaviour”.