Genoa, Venice, Turin and Naples: the Italian courts and republics

Genoa and the Carlone of Rovio

Genoa offered the lake masters a market that combined public works, a rich merchant aristocracy and a long-established community of builders from the Val d'Intelvi. In the second half of the sixteenth century the Genoese nobility built the palaces of the Strada Nuova, today's Via Garibaldi, whose planning involved Bernardino Cantone, a master from Cabbio in the Valle di Muggio, together with the Perugian architect Galeazzo Alessi.¹ Rocco Lurago of Pellio in the Val d'Intelvi designed the Palazzo Doria-Tursi, one of the largest of these residences. The rebuilding of Genoa as the city of the bankers of Spain, whose asientos financed the Spanish crown in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, created a demand for marble, stucco and fresco that the lake villages were well placed to meet.

The Carlone of Rovio, a village on the slopes of Monte Generoso above the Lake of Lugano, became the leading family of this Genoese phase. Taddeo Carlone (1543–1613), sculptor and architect, settled in Genoa and produced fountains, portals, altars and funerary monuments for the Genoese nobility.² His sons Giovanni Carlone and Giovanni Battista Carlone, born in Genoa, became fresco painters and decorated some of the most important churches of the city, including the Annunziata del Vastato and the Gesù. A separate family of the same name, from Scaria in the Val d'Intelvi, followed a different path and made its fortune north of the Alps, which is discussed in the next section. The two branches show how a single surname could stand for workshops active from Liguria to Bohemia within a few generations.³

Genoa also gave the emigrants access to the most developed financial market of the Mediterranean. The Casa di San Giorgio administered the Genoese public debt. Its shares (luoghi) were a common investment for Genoese families, institutions and foreigners who had lived in the city. Whether and to what extent lake masters placed their savings in Genoese public debt or deposits has not been studied systematically. The notarial evidence discussed later in this chapter suggests that most emigrants preferred to bring their savings home and invest them in land and houses, which they could supervise directly and which carried social prestige in the village.

Venice: the Lombardo, the Bregno and Giuseppe Sardi

Venice had attracted masters from the lake region since the fifteenth century. The Lombardo family of Carona and the Bregno (or Brignoni) of Righeggia near Osteno, on the Italian shore of the Lake of Lugano, shaped Venetian sculpture and architecture of the early Renaissance.⁴ In the seventeenth century Giuseppe Sardi, born in Morcote in 1624, became one of the leading architects of Venice. He designed the façades of Santa Maria del Giglio and of the church of the Scalzi, became head (gastaldo) of the stonemasons' guild in 1657 and worked for the Venetian state and for patrician families until his death in 1699.⁵

The Venetian building trades were organized in guilds (arti), among which the arte dei tagliapietra of the stonemasons was the most relevant for the lake masters. Admission required registration and the payment of fees. The guild statutes (mariegole) also laid down special rules for foreigners entering the trade, and these rules reflected the state of the labour market in a city whose population was to a large extent of foreign origin.⁶ The lake masters could also join the confraternity of the Milanese in Venice, the Scuola dei Milanesi, whose chapel of Saint Ambrose in the church of the Frari, with an altarpiece by Alvise Vivarini, contains tombs of Franciscans of Lombard origin and that of Claudio Monteverdi.⁷ Like the Lombard confraternities in Rome and Naples, the Scuola served as a place of worship, burial and mutual support for subjects of Milan and neighbouring territories.

Notes

1. Wikipedia, "Cantoni family", https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cantoni_family, and "Via Garibaldi (Genoa)", https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Via_Garibaldi_(Genoa), on the Palazzi dei Rolli as UNESCO World Heritage since 2006 (both used as a last resort). ↩
2. Paola Costa Calcagno, "Carlone, Taddeo", Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani, vol. 20 (Rome 1977), https://www.treccani.it/enciclopedia/taddeo-carlone_(Dizionario-Biografico)/. ↩
3. Wikipedia, "Carlone (Künstlerfamilie)", https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carlone_(K %C3%BCnstlerfamilie) (used as a last resort), which lists the painters Giovanni and Giovanni Battista Carlone of the Rovio branch and the stucco-workers and painters of the Scaria branch; see also Rüsch, "Emigrazione artistica: i Carlone/i tra Liguria e Boemia", Scuola ticinese no. 222, https://m4.ti.ch/fileadmin/DECS/DS/Rivista_scuola_ticinese/ST_n.222/ ST_222_Ruesch_emigrazione_artistica.pdf. ↩
4. Giovanni Mariacher, "Bregno, Lorenzo", Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani, vol. 14 (Rome 1972), https://www.treccani.it/enciclopedia/lorenzo-bregno_(Dizionario-Biografico)/, which also records Lorenzo Bregno's monuments in the Frari and in Santi Giovanni e Paolo. ↩
5. Alma Bacciarini, article on the Fondazione Pro Venezia Svizzera, Insula Quaderni, pp. 50–53, https://www.insula.it/images/pdf/resource/quadernipdf/Q13-19.pdf (issue and year not established). ↩
6. Università Ca' Foscari Venezia, Centro RiVe, seminar by Anna Bellavitis and Matteo Pompermaier, "«Delli forestieri che entrano in l'arte»: stranieri e mercato del lavoro negli statuti delle corporazioni veneziane (XVI–XVIII secolo)", 14 January 2021, https://www.unive.it/web/it/21166/comunita; 1600 Venezia, "From Bergamo to Venice with the tagiapiera, depentor, pennacchièr e sonador", https://1600.venezia.it/en/node/667 (the tagiapiera as stonemason who could also work as builder, master or architect); see also Richard Mackenney, Tradesmen and Traders: The World of the Guilds in Venice and Europe, c. 1250–c. 1650 (London 1987). ↩
7. Wikipedia, "Basilica di Santa Maria Gloriosa dei Frari", https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basilica_di_Santa_Maria_Gloriosa_dei_Frari (used as a last resort), on the Cappella dei Milanesi. ↩

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 October 2026.