ABSTRACT
This chapter addresses the issue of social mobility to describe the composition of the administrative elites, coinciding with the economic transformations of the fifteenth century. The recent historiography suggests that class solidarity and patronage were more than a trigger of social ascent: they played a significant role in the acceleration and orientation of these dynamics, thanks to the redistribution of resources. In fact, in some cases the benefits bestowed on individual rigattieri by their relationship with powerful patrons such as, notably, the Medici consisted not so much in economic advantages, but rather in some unique opportunities (such as politics) to rise. The upward mobility of rigattieri occurred at a stage where it could only be based on the public apparatus of government and the growing body of symbolic economic and political resources that they controlled and mobilized. In other words, the changing times gave the opportunity to some individuals from the ranks of the rigattieri to access careers beyond their role in the guild. Politics eventually took some of the rigattieri to the highest spheres of society, while at the same time affirming the social and professional discrimination against those rag and scrap-metal sellers.
