Social Support Systems in Rural Italy

This book examines the development of social support systems in the Modern age in the rural areas of the city-states of Northern Italy. This investigation achieves two main purposes: first, it allows researchers to understand the role occupied concretely by welfare and micro-credit activities in the political and socio-economic panorama of rural Northern Italy; secondly, it verifies to what extent the formation of a more or less structured support system influenced the establishment of local identity and the rooting of individuals. The book brings together perspectives from different fields of research ranging from economic and political history to the study of the history of ecclesiastical institutions, as well as integrating recent research on the anthropological value of welfare actions and the use of multiple historical sources. It considers how the retreat of the welfare activity of the State, associated with a depopulation of the rural areas of the peninsula and a steady increase of poverty into social fringes that were previously not affected by economic problems, pushes us to investigate more carefully the dynamics that in the Ancien Régime gave shape to the support activities against indigence and poverty. This book will be of interest to academics and students working in economic history and social history.

Giovanni Gregorini is Full Professor of Economic History and head of the Department of History and Philology at Catholic University of the Sacred Heart in Milan, Italy, where he teaches Economic History and Business History.

Luciano Maffi is a Lecturer in Economic and Global History at the University of Parma, Italy. He also teaches Economic History at the Catholic University of the Sacred Heart in Milan, Italy.

Marco Rochini is a Research Fellow at the Institute for History of Mediterranean Europe (National Research Council, Italy) and Adjunct Professor in Hagiography at the Catholic University of the Sacred Heart in Milan, Italy.