Page 44 - Upland Families, Elites and Communities

Giulio Ongaro and Edoardo Demo

silk twisting and the production of many ormesini, and on various occa-
sions I imported foreign grains in periods of famine,’ grains that fed both
the rural villages in the northern part of the province, and Vicenza itself
(Savio 2017, 312, n. 16). Besides their involvement in the silk sector at least
from the 1540s, the Lodi also had relevant interests in the woollen sector;
in a deed dated 11 April 1575, the brothers Giuseppe and Francesco Lodi
completed a division of the goods co-owned, begun in 1568. The 1575 doc-
ument recalls also the previous ones, and the 1568 deed lists all the goods
involved: a house ‘with an oven [...] and a dyeing plant,’ a chiodara in the
garden, while ‘all the clothes that are in the house, all the things related to
the dyeing plant, and all the fileselli [second-quality silk yarns]’ would be
allocated to one of the brothers (asvi, Notarile, Notaio Dal Ferro, b. 8683,
11 April 1575). The reference to the fileselli is also particularly interesting
because the 1579 tax survey of Schio mentions 15 samitari –i.e.weavers of
second-quality silk – who worked in the village; the majority of them came
from the Trento area and we can hypothesize that they were employed,
even if not exclusively, by the Lodi brothers. The presence of the silk weav-
ing in the Vicentine countryside is confirmed also by Panciera (2017, 215),
who wrote that after the Venetian authorization to produce ormesini in
1581, ‘the silk weaving flourished for some years in Schio, Valdagno, and
Arzignano.’
A final consideration is needed: why did a Vicentine nobleman, already
well established in silk production and trade in the city, create a company
with a rural merchant? First, we should take into account that the Ma-
grè family obtained citizenship in 1466 (asvi, Magrè, b. 9, c. 19 r.), com-
ing from a small community (Magrè) close to Schio, and its members were
deeply rooted in the village; in the description of the shooting above, we
referred to the palace owned by Stefano Magrè in the Oltraponte district, a
palace with a garden that faced the millrace toward Sareo street. Moreover,
they owned buildings with mill wheels in the millrace itself. The family was
so important in Schio that when the brother of Camillo Beffa, Ettore, was
interrogated by the Venetian authorities about potential witnesses of the
shooting, he answered: ‘I think that you can interrogate all the inhabitants
of that district, but you would hardly know the truth, because Giacomo
Magrè is the owner of many of the houses, and all the inhabitants are, we
can say,his slaves,and Giacomohimself made with them relevant pacts, so
they don’ttellwhattheysaw’(asvi,Magrè,b.4,fasc. 76). The continuation
of the trial seems to confirm this declaration, given that the Venetian offi-
cials admit the difficulty of proceeding because of the omertà on the event.

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