ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the reactions of Italian urban authorities towards migrant workers and on the connections between newcomers' integration and their reputations from the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries. In Rome, no distinctions were made between native inhabitants and foreigners with regard to their entitlements to local resources. In Milan, urban authorities did sometimes discriminate against 'foreigners', but in these cases the latter term was synonymous with 'unknown persons' and this could equally well refer to Milan-born persons without a permanent residence in the city. Moreover, even the most severe Milanese ordinances made differentiations and exceptions to tolerate the entry of migrants deemed useful. In this respect, the concept of migrant as a well-defined target of a clear policy seems to be anachronistic: early modern cities distinguished between settled and unsettled inhabitants, but not between natives and foreigners, and they differentiated between different categories of migrants on the basis of their purported usefulness.
