The Black Atlantic in Italian Cities, 1752-1852

This chapter focuses on a number of cases of enslaved and formerly enslaved African people in the cities of Venice, Genoa and Borgo San Donnino (modern-day Fidenza) who came from the Atlantic colonial world in the second half of the eighteenth century and the first half of the nineteenth century. Although the African-Atlantic presence is difficult to establish from a quantitative perspective, due to the lack of research on this topic and the difficulty in identifying such individuals in the official sources, there is evidence that ‘Atlantic’ slaves were also present in the Italian Peninsula, despite the fact that the Italian states did not have slaving colonies or a formal colonial empire overseas in the early modern period. Nevertheless, the movement of slaves from other colonial empires, such as the Portuguese, Spanish, Danish, and Dutch Empires, to Italian cities was a common phenomenon due to the role played by Italian merchants, ship captains and missionaries, who also operated as agents within these empires. Although they were active on a global level, Italian slave owners or intermediaries of slavery often had local roots – they may have come from the same Italian city or been members of the same family within the formal empires –, as in the case of the Genoese, but which can also be seen in relation to the intermediaries of the slave Emanuelle in Borgo San Donnino outlined below.