Newsgroup: italia.firenze.discussioni
Titolo: Firenze, la culla del capitalismo

Un altro articolo interessante. È la recensione di un libro che racconta 
del perché la Firenze del rinascimento sia divenuta ciò che è.
Renaissance Florence
Cradle of capitalism
Apr 16th 2009
 From The Economist print edition
The Economy of Renaissance Florence
By Richard A. Goldthwaite
Johns Hopkins University Press; 672 pages; $55 and £28.50
Buy it at
Amazon.com
Amazon.co.uk
RICHARD GOLDTHWAITE has served a long apprenticeship. As a dedicated 
student of the economy of Florence between the 13th and 16th centuries, 
he has published studies of the city’s buildings and banks, its private 
wealth and the demand for its art. Now he has stood back and produced a 
magisterial history which brings all the strands of the story together 
and becomes, among its other virtues, a persuasive account of early 
capitalism.
Florence became one of medieval and Renaissance Europe’s great 
industrial cities. Its principal resource was the river, the 
fast-flowing Arno, which provided power and water for industry and 
access to the sea for imports and exports. But an even greater source of 
strength was the enterprise and ingenuity of its merchants, who set 
about transforming a healthy local wool industry into an international 
business by importing large quantities of better-quality wool, from 
England and later Spain, to manufacture the fine, light worsted woollen 
cloth that was in demand all over Europe.
By the 1340s the economy was sufficiently robust to survive the 
bankruptcy of its leading bankers, the Bardi and the Peruzzi—“the 
Rothschilds of the Middle Ages”—and the Black Death, which reduced the 
population of the city by two-thirds. (The bankruptcies were not, 
apparently, all due to the default of the English king, Edward III, who 
has usually been blamed.)
Mr Goldthwaite, professor emeritus of history at Johns Hopkins 
University in Baltimore, Maryland, is an uncompromising researcher. For 
example, he has a revisionist view of the Medici, stubbornly refusing to 
eulogise Cosimo or Lorenzo de’ Medici, the conventional heroes of 
popular histories of Renaissance Florence. “One could write the history 
of Florentine banking in the 15th century without so much as mentioning 
the Medici,” he writes. He does so, partly to record that the decline 
and eventual collapse of the Medici bank had little impact on the 
banking system as a whole.
Banking developed in Florence because of the ingenious development of 
bills of exchange, first as a way of paying debts without having to 
transport cash, then as a means of evading the church’s usury laws, and 
finally as a means of extending credit. “When the merchant extended his 
traffic in the exchange market to enter the credit market, he became a 
banker”—and a capitalist.
Bankers became immensely rich, although they had only a minor role in 
channelling direct investments into manufacturing businesses. 
Manufacturing industry was financed by partnerships; the textile trade 
put out work to individual weavers and did not require capital to 
establish factories, though a silk workshop next to Sandro Botticelli’s 
studio made so much noise that the painter was forced to flee.
The Florentine businessmen were unfinished capitalists. Mr Goldthwaite 
subtly suggests that they lacked a strong competitive capitalist 
instinct: “Their behaviour at home and abroad often reveals an 
underlying spirit of corporatism.”
They certainly knew how to spend. In Renaissance Florence greed was 
good. The rich lavished their wealth on luxury goods for their palazzos, 
and on shameless dressing up. This encouraged an outburst of great work 
by artisan painters, sculptors, architects and decorators. The art 
market in Florence at that time was not as big as in Antwerp and Bruges, 
and there were only a third as many painters as in Bruges. Florentine 
artists were kept busy by local commissions. There was, however, a 
trickledown effect on taste which created a market for inferior art from 
the Low Countries. A 16th-century art historian, Giorgio Vasari, 
remarked that “there was not a shoemaker’s house in the city that did 
not have a Flemish painting.”
Early in the 17th century the banking industry was no longer a leader in 
Europe; that role had been acquired by Antwerp. And although specialist 
textiles retained an international market, the wool industry was in 
terminal decline.
Banking and wool had made Florence envied and admired throughout 
Renaissance Europe, but their shrinking did not mean that the city 
slipped out of Europe’s consciousness. Mr Goldthwaite’s conclusion is a 
happy one: “Wealth was recycled and invested in human capital and 
transformed into the patrimony of urban architecture, artwork and a 
tradition of craftsmanship unequalled in any other city.” It is an 
awesome legacy.
The Economy of Renaissance Florence.
By Richard A. Goldthwaite.
Johns Hopkins University Press; 672 pages; $55 and £28.50
http://www.economist.com/books/displaystory.cfm?story_id=13484709

 good.
Qui si cita bellamente Gordon Gekko!


A proposito di Rinascimento fiorentino
http://maxminiatisindacodifirenze.wordpress.com/
Overdose di feccia fiorentina
-- 
Skinbones gran prematuratore della notizia comunale.
Uno dei pochi che non vale la pena leggere su IFD
Scemo chi mi quota
A giugno voto al PD, ma non a Renzi. Usiamo il voto disgiunto.