The families and the terms of their integration

Who came: a portrait of the exile community

The Locarnese community in Zurich was small, socially mixed and bound together by kinship. The records analysed by Leo Weisz name, among others, Lodovico Ronco and his children, Guarnerio Castiglione, Andrea Cevio, Giacomo Zaretto, Aloisio Orelli with his wife, two sons and a daughter, and his cousins Bartolomeo and Filippo, Evangelista Zanino with his brothers Paolo and Girolamo, Taddeo Duno and his brother Giacomo, and the surgeon Giovanni Muralto with his sons Giangiacomo and Francesco.¹ To these must be added the Appiani, who are credited with introducing techniques of silk dyeing to Zurich and who became influential in the silk trade of Zurich and Basel,² and the Pebbia, whose name appears in Bergamo as Bebia among the Zurich families engaged in the silk and cloth trade there.³ Present-day guides to the city’s refugee history list Duno, Zanino, Muralt, Orelli and Pebbia as the core Locarnese families, together with the Pestalozzi from Chiavenna.⁴

The Pestalozzi were not Locarnese, but their history cannot be separated from that of the exiles. Johann Anton Pestalozzi came to Zurich from Chiavenna around 1550, obtained citizenship in 1567 and established himself as a cloth merchant dealing in linen, cotton fabrics, velvets and silks. After 1579 the family specialised in the trade in and processing of silk, with commercial networks reaching Milan, Lyon and Augsburg.⁵ He married into the Locarnese group: in 1578 Magdalena Muralto, the youngest sister of Francesco Muralto, became his wife, while the young Muralto received their commercial training partly with Aloisio Orelli, with Giacomo Duno and with their uncle Antonio Pestalozzi.⁶ Such marriages and apprenticeships turned a group of refugee households into a commercial network, in which capital, credit, information and trust circulated among relatives. It is the same pattern that historians of the Genevan Refuge, and of merchant banking generally, identify as the social foundation of early modern finance.

Not all who came could stay, and not all who could stay prospered. The economic historian Geering held that Zurich’s clumsy refugee policy had burdened the city with poor and even unemployable persons. Weisz, who is generally sympathetic to the refugees, nevertheless accepted that this older view contained a grain of truth in the case of the Locarnesi, although only a grain. After the restrictive ordinance of 1558, most of the rentiers and all the craftsmen with several trades left for Basel, where they met with fewer obstacles, while those who remained in Zurich included many single women with minor children who depended on support. In Weisz’s judgement only five particularly capable representatives of the second generation managed, after decades, to work their way out of poverty.⁷ The picture of a wealthy refugee elite transplanting its fortune intact from Locarno to Zurich must therefore be corrected. The capital that the Locarnesi brought was above all social and commercial capital: names, contacts, languages, knowledge of markets and techniques. Money capital they had to build up again, often in partnership with Zurich merchants.

Hintersassen without guild rights: the ordinance of 1558

The legal position of the refugees was determined by the council’s policy on residence and citizenship. They were admitted as Hintersassen, residents protected by the city but excluded from the political rights of citizens and, crucially, from the guilds. Since the guilds controlled access to crafts and retail trade, this exclusion defined what the Locarnesi could and could not do. The decisive regulation came in 1558. On 10 July 1558 the Saffron guild (Zunft zur Saffran), the guild of the merchants and shopkeepers, accepted six Locarnese heads of household against an annual payment of two pounds per family, as assigned residents without guild rights and subject to the restrictions laid down by the authorities.⁸ The six were permitted to deal in imported goods only, because the sale of domestic products was reserved to citizens. In other words, the Locarnesi were channelled into long-distance trade, the one field in which they did not compete with the Zurich craftsmen and in which their Italian connections gave them a comparative advantage.

The restriction had consequences that its authors did not foresee. A prohibition of commercial associations had been in force in Zurich since 1522. The Locarnese firms, organised as family partnerships and associations of the Italian type, opened a breach in this prohibition. Weisz sees in the new spirit they brought into the Saffron guild one of their most important contributions: foreign techniques and industries with rapidly growing commerce, which raised the prosperity of the city.⁹ The Ronco company is an early example. It imported mainly rice from Italy and exported Zwilch (ticking), ribbons and velvet. Its business associates included Jakob Werdmüller the younger and Caspar Wüst, which makes the company one of the first documented commercial connections between a Locarnese and a Zurich merchant, although no contracts or account books survive to show its exact form.

The exodus to Basel after 1558 is revealing. The city on the Rhine was more open: it admitted newcomers to citizenship more readily and left its trade in light cotton cloth (Tüchligewerbe) accessible to all. Bartolomeo and Filippo Orelli, Aloisio’s cousins, were received as citizens of Basel within months, Bartolomeo in 1559 and Filippo in 1560. As the first Locarnese to hold full civic status in a Swiss city they could export goods to Italy and France with the customs privileges of citizens. Guarnerio Castiglione moved to Basel after the dissolution of the Ronco company, became a citizen in 1567 and established a silk business. The velvet weaver Robazotto followed him after the velvet ordinance of 1568 and was admitted as a citizen of Basel in 1570.¹⁰ The HLS article on Protestant refugees confirms the general picture: in Zurich and Basel the Italian and Locarnese Reformed met significant resistance because the guilds feared competition in textiles. Only a few families (the Bernoulli, Legrand and Sarasin in Basel, the Orelli in Zurich) gained citizenship, while the others developed economic activities complementary to those of the resident population.¹¹

Citizenship: the exception and the rule

Citizenship was the key to full economic freedom, which is why the Zurich councils guarded it so jealously. The Great Council took the view that the Locarnesi did not know how to fit into the civic life of Zurich and, being of “welsch” blood, were by nature vindictive and inclined to violence. Admission to citizenship was therefore to be refused to them. In April 1565 the council allowed an exception: the Small Council could admit skilled craftsmen when no local candidates were available, but the clause was rarely used for Locarnesi.¹²

The first exception was Giovanni Muralto. In January 1566 he and his sons were granted citizenship as a gift in recognition of his useful services during the plague. Since the grant did not oblige the sons to remain in surgery, they went into trade. He was the first religious refugee to receive Zurich citizenship, an admission that opened a path for other families from Locarno.¹³ The second was Evangelista Zanino, who with his brother became a citizen on 2 January 1567. The official justification was his service in introducing Italian textile techniques and recruiting workers under dangerous circumstances, although Weisz identifies the real motive as the protection of the Zurich capital that had been entrusted to Zanino’s enterprises. Because the grant brought membership of the Saffron guild with it, the Zanino brothers became the first Locarnese guild members with full privileges.¹⁴

The Orelli had to wait far longer. Aloisio died in Zurich on 13 July 1572 as a resident without civic rights.¹⁵ His sons received a limited citizenship in 1592, which did not confer full rights. Requests for full citizenship were rejected in 1606, 1639 and 1673. Only in 1679 did the Great Council grant full citizenship to all branches of the family, and then only after the Orelli had threatened to move to Bern.¹⁶ The family thus waited more than 120 years for full civic equality. The Bernese branch of the Muralt, founded by Martino Muralto’s son Hans Ludwig, had been received into the citizenship of Bern as early as 1570 after his marriage to Maria von Mülinen, daughter of the Bernese magistrate Beat Ludwig von Mülinen.¹⁷ Lorenzo Pebbia, who by 1586 had accumulated an estate of 16,000 gulden after three decades of commercial effort, is not recorded as having obtained citizenship at all.¹⁸

The Zurich citizenship policy towards the Locarnesi was thus a policy of selective, merit-based and very slow admission. A doctor who had proved his worth in the plague, an entrepreneur whose firm held Zurich money, and eventually a merchant dynasty too important to lose: these were the cases in which the council opened the door. The same logic, in which admission follows proven usefulness and the threat of departure to a competing jurisdiction strengthens the applicant’s hand, recurs in many later chapters of Zurich’s history. The Orelli’s threat to move to Bern in 1679 is an early example of regulatory competition between Swiss cities for mobile capital, a phenomenon familiar to any practitioner who has advised on the relocation of a family office or holding company between cantons.

Notes

1. Weisz, “Die wirtschaftliche Bedeutung der Tessiner Glaubensflüchtlinge” (cited above). ↩
2. HLS, Italian edition, “Appiani” (cited above). ↩
3. HLS, Italian edition, Martin Bundi, “Bergamo”, version of 20 June 2002, https://hls-dhs-dss.ch/it/articles/007028/2002-06-20/. ↩
4. Hutzl-Ronge, “Locarner Glaubensflüchtlinge & die Reformation in Zürich” (cited above). ↩
5. HLS, Italian edition, “Pestalozzi (ZH)”, https://hls-dhs-dss.ch/it/articles/023830/. ↩
6. Weisz, “Die wirtschaftliche Bedeutung der Tessiner Glaubensflüchtlinge” (cited above). ↩
7. Weisz, “Die wirtschaftliche Bedeutung der Tessiner Glaubensflüchtlinge” (cited above). ↩
8. Weisz, “Die wirtschaftliche Bedeutung der Tessiner Glaubensflüchtlinge” (cited above). ↩
9. Weisz, “Die wirtschaftliche Bedeutung der Tessiner Glaubensflüchtlinge” (cited above). The prohibition of 1522 belongs to the early phase of the Zurich Reformation; see Chapter B.III on the Reformers’ suspicion of monopolies and great trading companies. ↩
10. Weisz, “Die wirtschaftliche Bedeutung der Tessiner Glaubensflüchtlinge” (cited above). ↩
11. HLS, Italian edition, Danièle Tosato-Rigo, article on Protestant refugees (German edition: “Protestantische Glaubensflüchtlinge”), version of 12 December 2014, https://hls-dhs-dss.ch/it/articles/026884/. ↩
12. Weisz, “Die wirtschaftliche Bedeutung der Tessiner Glaubensflüchtlinge” (cited above). “Welsch” was the common German term for Romance-speaking foreigners, Italians and French alike. ↩
13. Wikipedia (English), “Johannes Muralt” (cited above); Wikipedia (German), “Muralt (Adelsgeschlecht)”, https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muralt_(Adelsgeschlecht), which dates the grant to 31 January 1566. ↩
14. Weisz, “Die wirtschaftliche Bedeutung der Tessiner Glaubensflüchtlinge” (cited above); HLS, French edition, Martin Lassner, “Zanino, Evangelista”, version of 21 May 2012, https://hls-dhs-dss.ch/fr/articles/028581/. ↩
15. Wikipedia (English), “Aloisio Orelli” (cited above). ↩
16. HLS, Italian edition, Huber and Illi, “Orelli” (cited above). ↩
17. Dürmüller, “Migranten von einst” (cited above); HLS, Italian edition, Martin Illi, “Muralt”, https://hls-dhs-dss.ch/it/articles/049224/. ↩
18. Weisz, “Die wirtschaftliche Bedeutung der Tessiner Glaubensflüchtlinge” (cited above). ↩

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 September 2025.