Page 41 - Upland Families, Elites and Communities

Eonomy and Networks of Rural Elite Families in a Manufacturing Area

so became the reason for the crisis of the sector; indeed, between the 1570s
and the 1580s the competition of the silk industry in Rovereto and Tren-
to produced a crisis in silk manufacturing in Vicenza, with a collapse in
the number of active looms and the resorting, once more, to the export of
yarns (Panciera 2014, 142; 2017, 143; Vianello 2004a, 53–64).
Focusing on Schio and on its merchant-entrepreneurs, the history of the
spinning buildings recalled above again underlines the long-lasting per-
manence of some families (above all, the Baretta) at the top of the local
economic landscape, also with reference to the silk sector. Moreover, it in-
dicates the importance of the role played by urban families (especially the
Magrè family) in the growth of the rural village and of the local elites.
Already by the fifteenth century the rearing of silkworms and the pro-
duction of raw silk (that was then thrown within the urban walls) were
crucial sectors in the economy of Schio, and this centrality continued in
the following centuries. The merchants involved in this trade belonged to
the families that we have recalled frequently in the previous pages; Bar-
tolomeo Zamboni, for example, in 1541 ‘commissioned clothes and silk’
(asvi, b. 26, c. 10 r.), but the Toaldo family, who in the sixteenth century
competed with the Zamboni in terms of political, military, and economic
predominance in Schio (Savio 2017), also flanked investments in land own-
ership with investments in the credit sector, in the grain trade, in the cul-
tivation of mulberries and in the trade of silk cocoons. While Bernardino
Toaldo mainly managed the family lands, credits, and the grain trade, his
brother Giovan Battista managed the investments in the silk sector at least
from the 1540s (Savio 2017, 316, footnote 21; Demo and Ongaro 2023, 10).
The involvement of the Toaldo in this sector continued in the following
decades, even if it was never preeminent compared to the incomes com-
ing from land ownership and the credit market; an accounting book dated
1541–1615, written by Giovan Battista and by his son Cesare, shows that in
the decade 1594–1604, of the almost 1,300 lire earned yearly (on average),
only around 160 came from the selling of the mulberry loaves and, mainly,
of the silk cocoons. It is also interesting that in some years it is specified
that they sold not the cocoons but the reeled silk, indicating that year by
year the merchants decided which kind of product to place on the mar-
ket(ascs,Archivio OspedaleBaratto,b.19, cc. 187 v.–197 r.⁵). However, it
was not just the main families that belonged to the economic and politi-
cal elite of Schio, and, mainly, not just the ones traditionally at the head

⁵ I wish to thank Andrea Savio for advising of the existence of this accounting book.

39