The ‘untimely’ demise of a successful institution: the ItalianMonti di pietàin the nineteenth century

Abstract

Recent literature has clearly charted the growth of pawn credit in nineteenth-century developing countries in Europe. Such expansion has frequently been associated with governments’ concerns to prevent malpractice and promote the establishment of public agencies that mirrored the Italian Monti di pietà. Precisely at the time modernizing European societies adopted the model of Italian public pawn banks, Monti were being dismissed as a relic of a bygone age in their home country. Assembling and comparing data from an 1896 national survey, we conclude that, contrary to traditional assumptions, Italian pawn banks were not obsolete or out of place in the European context of nineteenth-century pawn credit. However, ideology and hostile legislation did hamper the access to credit of those most in need, and the choice hardly assisted the modernizing spurt of Italian society.

International Migration Responses to Modern Europe’s Most Destructive Earthquake: Messina and Reggio Calabria, 1908

“…Natoli et al (2016) provide data on one such type of institutionpledge banks (Monti di Pietà). These pawn shops, which operated as charitable religious institutions, were widely diffused, particularly in less developed areas such as Sicily and Calabria, and handled much of the country's small scale credit (Carboni and Fornasari 2019;Pascali 2016). The most recent year with complete coverage prior to the earthquake is 1905, and we use the data to compute each commune's log assets per capita and log credit per capita, as well as analogs of these measures capturing assets and credit within a 25-kilometer radius of each commune.…”