the terraferma state 105
and collective self-representation, as testified by Andrea Palladio’s work
in Vicenza and Michele Sanmicheli’s in Verona, and also by the urban
academies founded from the mid-16th century, like Vicenza’s Accademia
Olimpica (1555). Citizens’ ever greater share of landowning enhanced their
influence over many rural communities even though, between the east-
ern and central terraferma, growing Venetian landowning shared and also
competed with that influence. But cities were less dominant in the non-
agricultural economy, and rural elites and corpi territoriali gained leverage
with Venetian authority. Its attitude towards their demands was partly
pragmatic, intended to preserve rural institutions’ capacity to bear sub-
stantial fiscal and administrative loads, but this blended into more general
political strategy, as it realized and exploited their potential as a partial
counterbalance to the power of civic institutions and aristocracies.
Relations within urban elites and institutions were continually subject
to underlying tensions and open disputes, especially concerning ranking
within the elites and pressure for access to public life by newer, so-called
popolari families—many connected with merchant or manufacturing
wealth. However, this was not necessarily an issue for discrimination, as
some aristocratic families still had such investments. Interest among elites
focussed especially on election to posts of responsibility and prestige:
those with important implications for control over the contado (especially
vicars and podestà in charge of rural districts) and with responsibility for
such matters as tax exaction and administration of pawn banks, hospi-
tals, and grain reserves, which also afforded opportunities for illicit profit-
taking.41 Though membership of civic councils retained much symbolic
importance, council members’ interest and involvement in routine matters
declined, and such business tended to drift towards small executive bod-
ies. Factional divisions of varying profundity were frequently visible, led
in Verona, for example, by families such as the Bevilacqua and Nogarola.
In various cities, moreover, some families exhibited open sympathy for
foreign rulers—those in Verona for the Gonzaga of Mantua, the Empire,
Spain, and France—in terms not so much of treachery as of cultivating
clientage links and/or career opportunities. Others could be considered
41 Ventura, Nobiltà e popolo; Marino Berengo, “Patriziato e nobiltà: il caso veronese,”
Rivista Storica Italiana 77 (1975), 493–517; Ferraro, Family and Public Life; Paolo Lanaro
Sartori, “L’attività di prestito dei Monti di Pietà in Terraferma veneta: legalità e illeciti tra
Quattrocento e primo Seicento,” Studi Storici Luigi Simeoni 33 (1983), 161–77; Paola Lanaro
Sartori, Un’oligarchia urbana nel Cinquecento veneto. Istituzioni, economia, società (Turin,
1992).