Page 39 - Upland Families, Elites and Communities

Eonomy and Networks of Rural Elite Families in a Manufacturing Area

ready many years ago [...] many watermills, fulling structures, and many
silk spinning buildings have been built [on the millrace],’ and Giacomo Poz-
zolo, the archivist of the municipality of Schio, in his Notizie della terra di
Schio (written between 1712 and 1714) also confirms that on the local mill-
race ‘there were two spinning structures for the silk processing’ (Bologna
and Rossi 1876, 1; Fontana 1985, 82). Concerning the characteristics of the
spinning structures themselves, beyond the fact that they were activat-
ed by mill wheels, we do not know if they were the so-called ‘alla bolog-
nese’ (i.e. that used an advanced technology introduced in Bologna in the
sixteenth century), given that currently the research on the topic is lim-
ited to the seventeenth century and mainly to the area around Bassano
del Grappa and Marostica, in the north-eastern part of the province of Vi-
cenza (Panciera 2004, 240, 271–81; 2014, 144; Demo 2012, 31; Demo and
Vianello 2011, 37; Vianello 2004a, 88–99; Poni 2009, 266–7). However, it
is interesting that the 1579 tax survey mentioned a spinner named Giulio
‘Bolognese [i.e. from Bologna], spinner of [Giuseppe] Lodi’ (ascs, b. 21, c.
91 r.), suggesting the presence of a specialized worker from Bologna who
was employed in the spinning plant. The son of Giuseppe, Lorenzo, was
still residing in Schio in 1616, according to the tax survey produced in that
year (ascs, b. 22, c. 16 v.).
Before going on to observe the protagonists of the development of the
silk sector in Schio it is important to sketch a general picture of the tra-
jectories of this branch in the province of Vicenza. Already from the first
decades of the fifteenth century, the plantation of mulberries, the rearing
of silkworms and the production of raw silk was a dynamic sector, espe-
cially in the villages close to the mountains in the northern part of the
province. To give an example, in 1418 around 300 libbre (a hundred kilo-
grammes) were produced yearly (Demo 2001a, 47–8, 117; 2001b, 5; 2004,
51; 2012, 28–9; 2014, 111). By the mid-century in Schio there were traders
of gallette (the cocoons of the silkworms to be reeled), such as the Zamboni
brothers, already mentioned in the previous pages as investors in the sil-
ver mines in the Tretto upland together with the Toaldo family and some
Venetian noblemen, or Gualtiero da Schio, who in 1482 received a certain
amount of cocoons for the women he employed for the silk reeling (De-
mo 2001a, 120–1). If this step of the silk processing took place in the rural
areas, especially where there was a specialization in the rearing of the silk-
worms (Demo 2001a, 119–20), within the urban walls, in Vicenza, since the
first half of the fifteenth century there were spinning structures actioned
by human energy or by water wheels (Demo 2001a, 127–32). By the mid-

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