Demography, economy and social class

It is estimated that, at the end of the seventeenth century and the beginning of the eighteenth, Italy, inhabited by about 12 million people, had an urban population fluctuating between 14 and 19 per cent of the total. This was a higher percentage than in Germany (8–11 per cent) and compared well with the English figure (13–16 per cent). Nevertheless, the future Anglican bishop and parliamentarian Gilbert Burnet, who in 1685 traversed a large part of the Italian peninsula from Milan to Naples, was astonished ‘how there should be so much poverty in so rich a country, which is all over full of beggars’. The most populous Italian city was Naples, with about 250,000 inhabitants (half as many as London but equal to Amsterdam, Frankfurt and Leipzig put together); some distance behind came Milan, Venice, Rome and Palermo, with populations of between 100,000 and 140,000 (thus of the same order of magnitude as Vienna, with just over 100,000 people), while Genoa, Bologna and Florence, each mustering between 60,000 and 80,000 inhabitants, had stagnant population figures or had even slightly regressed in the previous hundred years.

Italy suffered a dramatic social and economic decline in the seventeenth century, as a result of the reduction in importance of the Mediterranean area following the rise of the great maritime empires and the powerful centralised monarchies north of the Alps. The production of woollen cloth fell in Milan from 15,000 pieces per annum to little more than 3,000 – a tendency followed by other centres in Lombardy such as Como, Monza and Cremona, as well as by Florence.