BASSO Enrico - MIUR - PRIN 2017 Linea A - LOC-GLOB. The local connectivity in an age of global intensification: infrastructural networks, production and trading areas in late-medieval Italy (1280-1500)

This project aims at investigating the economic networks in late-medieval Italy. Major markets will be observed from the viewpoint of the connectivity of their trades to local territories, as well as of these latter areas’ relationships to commercial junctions. The research shall therefore be set up on some local territories. These will serve as sample areas, but varied enough to give a picture of the Italian complexity: Liguria and Piedmont hinterland; Lombardy; the Venetian area; Sardinia. Matter of survey will be the trading relations of these areas with major world economies and local economic spaces (Genoa, Venice, Tuscany, the Catalan-Aragonese area, and Provence). The trading chain will thus be reconstructed in its whole, as well as the weight of local markets with respect to major distribution markets and possible forms of public and seigniorial control. Further investigations will aim at checking the relationships between the production areas of goods and the places of their local consumption. Focus will therefore be brought to local territories’ and minor centres’ capability to activate processes of economic integration, as well to develop, to condition and to orient networks in that key-phase of history, which takes place in an age of global intensification.