INVESTIRE NELLA CARITÀ. STRATEGIE E SEMANTICHE DEL DONO NELL'ITALIA SETTENTRIONALE (SECOLI XVII-XVIII)

Investing in charity. Strategies and semantics of donations in Northern Italy (XVII-XVIII centuries)This essay investigates those forms of charitable bequests and donations that were left to big urban confraternities in the modern age, with a special focus on Turin’s Compagnia di San Paolo and Brescia’s Congrega della Carità Apostolica.The case studies provide an insight into the sequences of relations, exchanges and mutual services that made concrete sense of charitable activities. In this way, set in the right context and extensively described, many charitable bequests came to look like a baroque architecture, built each time by superimposing interest (political, economic, class-based, ritual and other) on charity, and vice versa. The sources shed light on practices in which the language of interest and the language of charity are reflected into each other. In addition to the inheritances and bequests left to the city’s pia loca, such theme is even more glaringly emphasised by practices that were fairly widespread, even if scarcely investigated in historiography, such as charitable gift annuities, in which both confraternities were largely engaged. High expectations were set on such practices at many different levels, as much on the horizon of earthly life as on that of the afterlife, even after the development of a probability theory.