Money, Culture, Beauty. The Botti Family: Merchant-Bankers in Renaissance

This book deals with the typical commonalities and stories of the Florentine and European Renaissance. It is a work of economic and social history, which reconstructs the history of the Botti family, Florentine merchants, bankers and patrons in the Renaissance period. The family was active in some of the most important European cities as a part of a mixture of economic, social and cultural stimuli that characterized the Renaissance, and were spread throughout Europe. The general focus is on two prominent historiographic themes: (i) The ‘commercial diaspora’, networks of merchants who, maintaining connections to their home cities, operated in essence as cultural intermediaries. (ii) The intercultural exchange in Europe of the Sixteenth Century. The latter is discussed with an interdisciplinary approach focused on merchant’s activity. This book is of great interest to historians and philosophers of the Renaissance.

Angela Orlandi is Professor of Economic History in the Department of Economics and Management of the University of Florence. She is also Director of the Francesco Datini International Institute of Economic History in Prato. She chairs and serves on editorial boards of Italian and foreign journals. She is included in numerous national and international research projects and her interests invest international trade, business history in conjunction with the topic of Tuscan and Italian entrepreneurs abroad (which includes their strategies, methods, procedures and hierarchies), the public finance and the exchange and credit markets, with a particular focus on public debt; a final area consists of an examination of luxury consumption among Tuscan merchants between the fourteenth and sixteenth centuries.