Imprese ospedaliere e imprese private. Sistemi contabili e amministrativi a confronto

Tognetti Sergio

2020-01-01

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Abstract

The essay analyses the administrative practices and accounting management of Italian hospitals in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, with a concluding focus on the Florentine situation in the fifteenth century. The aim is to verify whether or not the historiography on Italian hospitals of the late Middle Ages and the Renaissance, recently very interested in the good practices of financial management of care, is right in speaking of the hospitals of the time in aziendalistic terms, that is, with an approach that evaluates the management of income and expenditure as similar to that followed in contemporary private enterprises. The comparative approach, with an eye to the spread of double-entry bookkeeping, from the private to the religious-assistance sphere, highlights affinities and divergences, largely dependent not so much on the know-how of the administrators (often of a high level) as on the ethical-social aims of the bodies in question.