Un protagonista introvabile: la finanza locale italiana in età moderna

The working of public finance at the local level was of crucial importance to the overall transformation of state finance during the early modern age, yet studies devoted to local finance are rare and our grasp of this crucial topic remains inadequate. This paper illustrates the common features shaping local finance in the composite context of early modern Italian States. Communities played a vital role both extracting fiscal resources and allocating the tax burden among its members. The management of local finance was crucial not only to assess social and economic developments within communities but to grasp changes in core-periphery relations. Centralization, contractual agreements and control were not disjoint propositions but sides of the same coin.