Page 46 - Upland Families, Elites and Communities

Giulio Ongaro and Edoardo Demo

the German area was a key element of this economic inclination. The Barat-
to family, for example (that also came from the village of Magrè), made a
fortune trading with the bordering area of Trento, and in a 1541 tax survey
the sons of Francesco Baratto – including the abovementioned Cristoforo
– besides owning two shops in the main square of Schio, ‘trades with hors-
es per tedesca [i.e. in the German territories]’ (asvi, Estimo, b. 26, c. 223 v.).
Cereals were certainly among the products they traded, given that in 1557
Francesco himself proposed to the municipality of Vicenza to supply the
city with 1,500 staia (more than 400 hectolitres) of wheat to be purchased
‘in the German territories’ (Snichelotto 2007, 79). The Toaldo family and
the Lodi, too, were involved in the cereals trade, besides the silk one; as an-
ticipated, in his petition for obtaining citizenship Giuseppe Lodi affirmed
that he supplied the province with foreign grains (almost certainly coming
from the German area), ‘especially in 1560 and in this year [1581], when I
supplied the city [Vicenza] with 12,000 staia of wheat [around 3,245 hec-
tolitres] from foreign countries’ (Savio 2017, 312, n. 16). Moreover, similar
businesses were the basis of the wealth of the Zamboni family, or of the Pi-
lati from Torrebelvicino, bordering Schio, that amassed their first fortunes
smuggling cereals in the Trento area at the beginning of the sixteenth cen-
tury, and then reinvested them during the century in lands, metalworking,
wool manufacturing, and in the reeling of raw silk that was then exported
to Genoa and Milan (Demo and Ongaro 2023, 7–8). Using a metaphor, we
can say that the classical organization of the plots in the Venetian coun-
tryside, the piantata, with the mulberries that divided the fields cultivated
with cereals, is a perfect image of the entrepreneurial strategies of the mer-
chant families in Schio and in Vicenza.
Returning to Giacomo Magrè, it seems that his relationships with the
merchants of Schio were not lucrative, given that from being one of the
most relevant silk merchants in Vicenza (Demo 2004, 38), he became sad-
dled by debts, probably thanks also to the huge number of overdue debts of
the merchants from Schio, and he experienced a downward spiral. There-
fore, it is not a coincidence that even if in the 1616 tax survey Pietro Magrè
was still one of the main landowners in the area of Schio, all the manu-
facturing structures owned in the past by the family in the Sareo district
have been sold: the spinning plant, as anticipated, was sold to the Baret-
ta family, while the two mills, with six wheels, were sold, one to the heirs
of Bartolomeo Ganzega, and one to Giuseppe Dalla Fina (ascs, b. 22, cc.
42 r., 63 r.). Regarding Giuseppe Lodi, his petition for citizenship was ap-
proved in 1581 and he moved his spinning plant within the urban walls,

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