ABSTRACT
In his work The Professions. The Long View, published in 1973, Cipolla underlined the importance undertaken by professional groups, such as notaries and lawyers, connected in many ways to the process of formation and expansion of urban markets in the cities of ancien regime. 1 Notaries have been subject of a firm and specific tradition of study for a long time.2 The interest of scholars dedicated to notaries has been extended to judges and lawyers.3 Less attention, though, has been dedicated to brokers.4 Certainly, compared with notaries, judges and lawyers, brokers ranked much lower on the hierarchical scale of professions. At the end of the sixteenth century, Tommaso Garzoni wrote, in his La piazza universale di tutte le professioni del mondo, that in 'questo mestiere traditore .. .le bugie, i spergiuri, i sacramenti falsi, gli inganni, le frodi, le trovate son cosi proprie come il rub bare ai cingari et il predare ai pirati'. 5
Nevertheless, in the same period, a jusrisconsult Benvenuto Stracca, in his treaty De Proxenetis et proxeneticis, expressed a more balanced judgement: 'Proxenetarum ufficium non est adeo sordidum', as 'proxenetae utiles sunt in civitatibus', remembering the connection between the activity of the brokers and the life of urban markets.6
