Le finanze dell’ospedale degli Innocenti di Firenze: dalla fondazione alla bancarotta del 1579

Sergio Tognetti

2022-01-01

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Abstract

The essay analyzes the financial history of one of the most important orphanages of Renaissance Italy: the Spedale degli Innocenti in Florence. Thanks to the survival of all the ledgers of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, it is possible to reconstruct the costs of assistance to abandoned children: from the wages of the wet nurses to the costs of food, lodging and clothing; from the costs of construction and maintenance of landed property to those of providing a dowry to the young girls. On the other hand, we can outline the forms of financing provided by private individuals, by the state offices and by the Guild of Por Santa Maria. An apparently arid sequence of financial statements, inventories, bank deposits and current accounts reveals an entire universe made up of administrators, treasurers and accountants who gravitated around what we can define as welfare before welfare in a society of the ancien regime. There are also political implications, given the importance that the Spedale degli Innocenti had in late republican and ducal Florence.