Potere e carità a Montevarchi nel XVI secolo: Storia di un centro minore della Toscana medicea (review)

Lorenzo Piccioli is not only a scholar of early modern Montevarchi with a doctoral degree from the University of Pisa; he is also a Communal Councilor in Montevarchi. His study of “power and charity” in this small Tuscan “near-city” (4) is thus both a labor of love and the fruit of archival research.

Piccioli makes only modest claims for the importance of Montevarchi, calling it a “minor center” (3) of the Medicean state. Located in the Valdarno, it was a flourishing provincial commercial center, noted for its excellent wines and with a population of several thousand. It lacked a bishop, but was otherwise similar to other small Tuscan towns, over which the Medici dukes typically appointed functionaries who imposed the ducal will and served as a conduit between those towns and the capital of Florence.

Since Montevarchi was typical rather than unusual, this book’s usefulness must be measured by its ability to document with precision continuity and change from the sixteenth through eighteenth centuries (the period that, despite the book’s title, represents the author’s focus). Piccioli refers several times to work by Giovanna Benadusi on Poppi as one example of the research that has recently illuminated the strategies devised by provincial elites to maintain their positions. Piccioli shows that Montevarchi participated in a restrictive “oligarchic tightening,” but that there was no strict caesura in entry into the elite (9). With the close integration of Montevarchi into the ducal state and the public works that the Medici initiated, the elite found new opportunities: as students in Tuscany’s institutions of higher education, as military officers, as ducal functionaries, and, especially, as notaries (Piccioli describes the powerful Bartoli family as creating a notarial “dynasty” [252]). Men who had been farmers or shopkeepers in the fifteenth or early sixteenth centuries married into Florentine families, acquired and consolidated property locally and in Florence, expanded and diversified their businesses, and sought Florentine citizenship. Piccioli’s account of the importance of this status, how it was attained, and by whom, is detailed and worthwhile. He also demonstrates for the local elite that, unsurprisingly, marriage was an important part of “a strategy aimed at preservation of the lineage” (93).

Montevarchi’s social structures underwent a dynamic evolution amounting to a “small earthquake” (11) during the sixteenth century. In Montevarchi’s Monte di Pietà (civic charitable pawnshop), created at the late date of 1551, Piccioli sees qualities foreshadowing “modernity” (279). He also points out that Montevarchi’s two significant charities, the Monte and the Fraternity of the Milk (Fraternita del Latte) and the eponymous convent the latter sponsored in the sixteenth century, were supported and run by the town’s elite.

A significant portion of the book examines the development of this elite. Piccioli documents an “oligarchy within an oligarchy” (45) that not only held important offices, but also controlled local pious establishments. Those seeking detail, down to names, marriages, occupations, offices held, and wealth, about Montevarchi’s dominant circles need look no further. Piccioli proves what is known, though the work of Burr Litchfield (whose Emergence of a Bureaucracy: The Florentine Patricians, 1530–1790 [1986], is not cited), for Florence: the elite maintained and displayed its status by dominating local offices. Sixty-seven of 124 gonfalonieri, or standard-bearers, who served from 1530 to 1599 came from only ten powerful local families. Piccioli observes the importance of other families in their roles in civic pious institutions, church offices, ducal service, or the professions.

As the sixteenth century wore on, a handful of families controlled more and more local property as well as offices like the Riformatori. One example is the Soldani. Beginning as shopkeepers in the sixteenth century, they were able to open a business in Florence, “an evident sign of...