From the magistri commacini to the Solari: the long medieval line

The Lombard laws and a disputed name

The earliest written trace of builders associated with the lake region is found in Lombard law. The Edict of King Rothari, promulgated on 22 November 643, contains two chapters, numbered 144 and 145 in the modern editions, on the liability of a magister commacinus who undertakes to build or repair a house "with his colleagues" (cum collegantes suos) and on accidents in which workers or passers-by are killed.¹ A later text of the eighth century, the Memoratorium de mercedibus commacinorum, usually attributed to the reign of Liutprand, fixes tariffs for different kinds of building work, from walls and vaults to plaster and chimneys.² These two texts show that by the seventh and eighth centuries builders worked in teams under a responsible master, that they concluded agreements with their clients and that the law regulated both their liability and their pay.

The meaning of commacinus has been disputed since the eighteenth century. One school derives it from Como and sees in the magistri commacini the ancestors of the later lake masters. Another derives it from machina (scaffolding) or from a Latin term for building work, which would make the word a description of a trade without any regional reference. The question cannot be settled from the laws themselves, which say nothing about the origin of the masters.³ What can be said with confidence is that the name later became attached to the builders of the lake region, and that nineteenthcentury historians such as Giuseppe Merzario in I maestri comacini (1893) built on it a romantic account of an unbroken guild of builders from the Lombard kingdom to the Renaissance.

Common misconception. The maestri comacini are often presented as a secret and continuous guild of builders, sometimes even as ancestors of freemasonry, which kept the building knowledge of antiquity alive from the seventh century to the Baroque. The sources do not support this. The Lombard laws show only that a trade of building masters existed and was regulated. The later emigration of the lake masters rested on family workshops, village networks and training on the building site. It can be traced continuously only from the twelfth century onwards. The continuity was social and economic, renewed in every generation by apprenticeship and marriage.⁴

The Campionesi and the cathedrals of the plain

From the late twelfth century the documents allow the historian to follow identifiable families. The masters of Campione on the Lake of Lugano, the Campionesi, worked on the cathedral of Modena, where Anselmo da Campione and his descendants directed the works over several generations, and later on the cathedral of Milan and on churches in Bergamo, Verona and Monza.⁵ Giovanni da Campione worked on Santa Maria Maggiore in Bergamo in the fourteenth century, while Bonino da Campione produced the equestrian monument of Bernabò Visconti, now in the Castello Sforzesco, as well as the tomb of Cansignorio della Scala in Verona.⁶ Marco da Campione is recorded among the first engineers of the cathedral of Milan after the foundation of the works in 1386.

The Fabbrica del Duomo of Milan, the building office that Gian Galeazzo Visconti endowed in October 1387 with quarrying rights and the free transport of marble, was for more than a century one of the largest employers of lake masters. Its archive holds some 2,700 historical registers, among them the books of income and expenditure in which payments to stonemasons, sculptors and engineers, many of them from the Luganese and Comasque villages, were entered by the day or by the piece. A large selection of these records was published in the nine volumes of the Annali della Fabbrica del Duomo between 1877 and 1885, which give historians a long series of data on the pay of skilled building labour.⁷ For the villages the Fabbrica had a further significance: it was an institution that paid regularly in Milanese money, kept written accounts and trained young men who could then take their skills to other building sites.

Notes

1. Edictus Rothari, in Monumenta Germaniae Historica, Leges IV (ed. Friedrich Bluhme, Hanover 1868); Italian translation in Claudio Azzara and Stefano Gasparri (eds), Le leggi dei Longobardi (Milan 1992; 2nd ed. Rome 2005). For the date of promulgation and the liability of the commacini for collapsing houses see Wikipedia, "Edictum Rothari", https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edictum_Rothari, and "Comacine masters", https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comacine_masters (used as a last resort); Ferdinando Reggiori, "Maestri comacini", Enciclopedia Italiana (Rome 1931), https://www.treccani.it/enciclopedia/maestri-comacini_(Enciclopedia-Italiana)/. ↩
2. Reggiori, "Maestri comacini" (cited above); Wikipedia, "Comacine masters" (cited above), which refers to the Memoratorium of Liutprand. The attribution to Liutprand is conventional. ↩
3. Reggiori, "Maestri comacini" (cited above), on the view that the name is a generic designation of building crews; Wikipedia, "Comacine masters" (cited above), on the derivation from Como and from cum machinis. ↩
4. Giuseppe Merzario, I maestri comacini. Storia artistica di milleduecento anni (600–1800) (2 vols, Milan 1893), listed in Reggiori, "Maestri comacini" (cited above); on the freemasons' claim of descent see Wikipedia, "Comacine masters" (cited above); on family workshops and kinship networks see Laura Damiani Cabrini, "Maestranze artistiche", Dizionario storico della Svizzera (DSS), version of 20 March 2015, https://hls-dhs-dss.ch/it/articles/047823/. ↩
5. Augusta Bubani, "Anselmo da Campione", Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani, vol. 3 (Rome 1961), https://www.treccani.it/enciclopedia/anselmo-da-campione_(Dizionario-Biografico)/. ↩
6. Rossana Bossaglia, "Bonino da Campione", Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani, vol. 12 (Rome 1971), https://www.treccani.it/enciclopedia/bonino-da-campione_(Dizionario-Biografico)/; Regione Lombardia, Lombardia Beni Culturali, "Protiro dei Leoni Bianchi" (Santa Maria Maggiore, Bergamo, Giovanni da Campione and workshop, c. 1360), https://lombardiabeniculturali.it/opere-arte/schede-complete/w6010-00168. ↩
7. Annali della fabbrica del Duomo di Milano dall'origine fino al presente (6 vols and 3 appendix vols, Milan 1877–1885); for the foundation of 1387, the archive and the series see Wikipedia, "Veneranda Fabbrica del Duomo di Milano", https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Veneranda_Fabbrica_del_Duomo_di_Milano (used as a last resort). ↩

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.