This article analyses the formation of transregional families through a case study on the attempts by a Maltese nobleman, Giovanni Pio de Piro, to establish his household in the Kingdom of Sicily in the eighteenth century and what the consequences were for his heirs. Drawing on recent perspectives on transregional and transnational families, this paper considers the evolution of inheritance and marriage strategies directed towards migration in the broader context of eighteenth-century Malta and Sicily. In doing so it discusses how those features of kinship most commonly associated with the ‘rootedness’ of noble households were also adapted towards transregional mobility.
This article investigates office‐holding and private enterprise in eighteenth‐century Sicily through a case study of the activities of Baron de Piro, a native of Malta. Based on documents held in Maltese and Sicilian archives, the article demonstrates how political developments in the kingdom both opened up and circumscribed the opportunities within which an upwardly‐mobile household sought its fortune by identifying the social, political and economic contexts in which they operated. In doing so, it delivers insights into the impact of successive regime changes on the socio‐economic landscape in Sicily as it passed from the Austrian Habsburgs to the Bourbons of Naples.
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