A borderland economy: lines to the modern financial centre
What the Middle Ages left behind
The medieval history of the Ticinese territories can be read as a prehistory of the modern financial centre, provided that the lines are drawn with care. No bank in Lugano descends from a medieval moneylender, and the institutions of the twentiethcentury financial centre were created under Swiss federal law in circumstances that had nothing to do with the Visconti or the Rusca. What the Middle Ages left behind was a set of structural conditions and professional habits: a territory placed between a large Lombard economy and the Alpine north, a population accustomed to living from intermediation, a legal culture built on written instruments, and a long experience of multiple currencies and multiple sovereigns. These conditions did not determine the later history, but they made certain developments easier than others. They also explain why Lugano's financial centre took the form it did when, in the twentieth century, the political and monetary difference between Switzerland and Italy made the border profitable again.
Five lines connect the medieval borderland with the financial centre that later chapters of this book describe. They concern the Lombard hinterland, the plurality of currencies, the notarial tradition, the economy of the border and the value of legal continuity. Each of them has a medieval form and a modern form, and each has consequences for the practitioner who advises clients in or through Lugano today.
The Lombard hinterland
The first and most obvious line is the orientation towards Lombardy. For the whole period covered by this chapter the markets, the creditors, the courts of appeal and the ruling families of the Ticinese territories were in Como and Milan. The Confederate conquest changed the sovereign and left the economic geography as it was. Lugano remained a market of the Lombard periphery, and the Lombard plain remained the source of grain, textiles, salt and credit. When Lugano developed into a financial centre after the First World War and above all after 1945, its clients came overwhelmingly from the same hinterland: the entrepreneurs, professionals and families of Milan, Como, Varese and the wider Lombard economy, which is today one of the wealthiest regions of Europe (see Chapters D.II and H.I).
The modern relationship has a scale that the medieval one never had, but its structure is similar. Lugano sells to a much larger neighbour services that the neighbour cannot provide for itself, or cannot provide on the same terms. In the Middle Ages these services were the passage of goods, the supply of Alpine produce and the labour of emigrant builders. In the twentieth century they became the safekeeping and management of capital, which Italian clients valued for the stability of the Swiss franc, the protection of banking secrecy under Art. 47 of the Banking Act and the proximity of a financial centre in which they could be served in their own language.1 The dependency on a single neighbour, with all its risks, is as old as the territory itself. The medieval towns suffered when Milan closed its markets or raised its tolls. The modern financial centre suffered when Italy's tax amnesties and the end of banking secrecy for Italian clients drained a large part of the undeclared assets from Lugano's banks (see Chapter E.II).
Notes
- Federal Act of 8 November 1934 on Banks and Savings Banks (Banking Act, BankA), SR 952.0, Art. 47 (custodial sentence of up to three years or a monetary penalty for whoever intentionally discloses a secret entrusted to them as an officer, employee, agent or liquidator of a bank), https://www.droit-bilingue.ch/de-it/9/95/952.0-47-100.html. See Chapters D.I and D.II. ↩
For general information only. This article does not constitute legal or tax advice, does not replace advice on an individual case and creates no lawyer-client relationship. It reflects the legal position as of August 2025.