Abstract
The study of the various forms that charity and poor relief took in the Italian states during the early modern age has received much attention in the last 15 years, both from Italian historians and from Italianists abroad. There is therefore an extensive literature of case studies as well as a number of overviews and these make it possible to advance some hypotheses as to continuities and changes in policies towards the poor between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries and as to the traits which distinguish Italian welfare systems from those of other European countries.
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Notes
Estimates of this income are given in D. Lombardi, Povertà maschile e povertà femminile. L’Ospedale dei Mendicanti nella Firenze dei Medici (Bologna 1988), p. 178, for Florence, and
S. Cavallo, Charity and Power in Early Modem Italy. Benefactors and their Motives in Turin, 1541–1789 (Cambridge, 1995), p. 122, note 73, for Turin.
S. J. Woolf, ‘The poor and how to relieve them: the Restoration debate on poverty in Italy and Europe’, in J. A. Davis and P. Ginsborg (eds.), Society and Politics in the Age of the Risoigimento, Essays in Honour of Dennis Mack Smith (Cambridge, 1991), p. 50
A. Groppi, I conservatori della virtu. Donne recluse nella Roma dei Papi (Rome-Bari, 1994), pp. 65–7.
A. Giacomelli, ‘Conservazione e innovazione nell’assistenza Bolognese del Settecento’, in Istituto per la Storia di Bologna, Forme e soggetti dell’intervento assistenziale in una città di antico regime, vol. 2 (Bologna, 1986), pp. 169, 229
S. Raffaele, Dalla Beneficenza all’Assistenza. Momenti di politica assistenziale nella Sicilia modema (Catania, 1990), pp. 35–6; Cavallo, Charity and Power, pp. 228, 246–9.
E.g. in Turin and in Bologna. Cavallo, Charity and Power, ch. 2; N. Terpstra, Lay Confraternities and Civic Religion in Renaissance Bologna (Cambridge, 1995), pp. 201–4.
In the remainder of this section my remarks refer to the case of Siena, Florence, Lucca, Bologna and Turin drawing on: S. K. Cohn, Jr., Death and Property in Siena 1205–1800: Strategies for the Afterlife (Baltimore, 1988); Lombardi, Povertà Maschile;
S. Russo, ‘Potere pubblico e carità Privata. L’Assistenza ai Poveri a Lucca tra XVI e XVII Secolo’, Società e storia, 7 (1984); Terpstra, Lay Confraternities; Cavallo, Charity and Power.
B. Pullan, ‘Support and redeem: charity and poor relief in Italian cities from the fourteenth to the seventeenth centuries’, Continuity and Change, 2 (1988), pp. 196–9.
E. Grendi, ‘Pauperismo e albergo dei poveri nella Genova del seicento’, Rivista storica Italiana, 87 (1975), p. 639; Russo, ‘Potere pubblico’
M. Fatica, ‘La regolarizzazione dei mendicanti attraverso il lavoro: l’Ospizio dei Poveri di Modena nel settecento’, Studi storici, 23 (1982), pp. 232–3; Lombardi, Povertà maschile, pp. 65, 67, 85
B. Pullan, Rich and Poor in Renaissance Venice. The Social Institutions of a Catholic State, to 1620 (Oxford 1971), pp. 259–61, 278–9, 377–8, 385–94
S. Cohen, The Evolution of Women’s Asylums since 1500 (Oxford, 1992). Sicily is another example of an area where institutions were rare throughout the seventeenth century — with the exception, once again, of initiatives for ‘wandering children’ who were captured and confined to learn a trade.
S. Raffaele, ‘Infanzia abbandonata: le normative nel decennio Francese’, in G. Botti, L. Guidi and L. Valenzi (eds.), Povertà e beneficenza tra Rivoluzione e Restaurazione (Naples, 1989).
D. Lombardi, ‘L’Ospedale dei Mendicanti nella Firenze del Seicento. Da inutile serraglio dei mendici a conservatorio e casa di forza per le donne’, Società e storia, 7 (1984), p. 290.
S. Cavallo ‘Conceptions of poverty and poor relief in Turin in the second half of the eighteenth century’, in S. J. Woolf (ed.), Domestic Strategies: Work and Family in France and Italy, 1600–1800 (Cambridge, 1991), p. 197, table 6.13.
A. Scotti, ‘Malati e strutture ospedaliere dall’età dei lumi all’Unità’, Storia d’Italia, Annali 7 (Turin, 1984).
M. Fatica, ‘La reclusione dei poveri a Roma durante il pontificato di Innocenzo XII (1692–1700)’, Ricerche per la storia religiosa di Roma, 3 (1979), pp. 189–90.
In Lombardy Case d’Industria sprang up in a number of towns from 1784 onwards; in Piedmont the Ritiro degli Oziosi e Vagabondi was founded in 1786; in Emilia workshop-institutions were set up from 1809 onwards under the name of Case d’Industria; in Tuscany the Napoleonic government set up Depots de Mendicité in 1808. E. Bressan, Povertà e assistenza in Lombardia nell’età Napoleonica (Milan, 1985); Cavallo, Charity and Power, pp. 236–41
M. Marcolin, ‘The Casa d’Industria in Bologna during the Napoleonic period: public relief and subsistence strategies’, EUI working paper n.85/132 (Florence, 1985)
M. Palazzi, ‘Donne povere tra lavoro, assistenza e sigurtà. Tessitrici e filatrici della Casa d’Industria e della Casa provinciale del Lavoro (Bologna XVIII secolo)’, in P. Nava (ed.), Operaie, serve, maestre, impiegate (Turin, 1992)
S. J. Woolf, The Poor in Western Europe in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries (London and New York, 1986), ch. 3.
S. Cavallo ‘Bambini abbandonati e bambini “in deposito” a Torino nel Settecento’, in Enfance Abandonnée et Societé en Europe, Collection de l’Ecole Française de Rome (Rome, 1991). Many other city councils provided free midwifery to poor wives at the moment of childbirth.
See N. M. Filippini, ‘The church, the state and childbirth: the midwife in Italy during the eighteenth century’, in H. Marland (ed.), The Art of Midwifery. Early Modern Midwives in Europe (London, 1993); Cavallo, Charity and Power, p. 204. This service was often also provided by private maternity charities set up by groups of philanthropists.
Ibid., pp. 235–6; L. Guidi, L’Onore in pericolo. Carità e reclusione femminile nell’Ottocento Napoletano (Naples, 1991), p. 25.
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Cavallo, S. (1998). Charity as Boundary Making: Social Stratification, Gender and the Family in the Italian States (Seventeenth-Nineteenth Centuries). In: Cunningham, H., Innes, J. (eds) Charity, Philanthropy and Reform. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-26681-4_5
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