340 anna bellavitis
Popular-Class Families and LaborGeographic, Social, and Family Mobility
in Venice, the labor force was constantly renewed by immigration, both
temporary and permanent. thanks to government policies favoring the
immigration of artisans, the city was repopulated after the epidemics of
the 14th, 16th, and 17th centuries. the balance between the necessary
openness and protection of local privileges was not, however, easy to
safeguard, at all levels of society. thus, the government enacted a series
of provisions, sometimes in contradiction with each other, in order to
reserve some positions in guilds for Venetians or even in order to limit
the presence of some categories of immigrants, such as, for instance, those
from Bergamo in the Arte della Seta between the 15th and 16th centuries.
along the same lines, there were some guilds that were both “national”
and professional, such as in the sectors of bread-making and glass-making.
the competition between immigrant and local workers extended to the
modalities of recruitment of manpower, for immigrants tended to privi-
lege their own fellow countrymen and to offer incentives for their influx
into the city. in particular, those from Bergamo reserved the lion’s share
for their own compatriots, and their biographies, reconstructed by means
of judicial records, describe the vicissitudes of young men who left the
lombard valleys “with only the skin on their bones,” in the footsteps of
an uncle or sometimes paying an intermediary to convey them towards
the capital and introduce them to the labor market. once arrived in Ven-
ice, these immigrants tracked down cousins or uncles who had arrived
before them.47
the wide variety of occupations and of levels of wealth within the
“popular” classes defeat any attempt at generalization. the fragmentation
of Venetian guilds, according to the phases of manufacturing any given
product, for example in the textile industry, certainly prevented dangerous
1992); Francesca medioli, L’Inferno monacale di Arcangela Tarabotti (turin, 1990), note on
p. 93.
47 molà and mueller, “essere Stranieri”; Richard mackenney, Tradesmen and Traders. The
World of the Guilds in Venice and Europe, c.1250–1650 (london, 1987); Francesca trivellato,
Fondamenta dei vetrai. Lavoro, tecnologia e mercato a Venezia tra Sei e Settecento (Rome,
2000); Paola lanaro, ed., At the Centre of the Old World. Trade and Manufacturing in Venice
and the Venetian Mainland, 1400–1800 (toronto, 2006); andrea Vianello, L’arte dei calegheri
e zavateri di Venezia tra XVII e XVIII secolo (Venice, 1993); Zannini, “l’altra Bergamo in
laguna: la comunità bergamasca a Venezia,” in marco cattini and marzio a. Romani, eds.,
Storia economica e sociale di Bergamo, vol. 3, part 2 (Bergamo, 1998), pp. 175–93.