ABSTRACT
The aim of this paper is to highlight certain aspects of trade and craft guilds which, though little known, provide great interest for their modernity, being in fact the very mechanisms for granting welfare and social benefits that these guilds created. 1 In some of these guilds such mechanisms took the form of assistance, while in others they took on the features of a real and proper organisation that developed from within the guilds on a scale and significance proportionate to the importance the guilds themselves assumed. In the first instance the body distributing the service was the chapel or the church, whereas in the second it was the 'mont'(i.e. an abbreviation adopted in this present paper to signify a generic form of monti di pieta, which in modem terminology we would nowadays perhaps call 'pawn institution'), and/or the conservatorio (which at the time was a religious institution for the education of females). In the course of drawing up its own statute each trade would generally have concerned itself also with choosing its own patron saint, and with erecting a chapel (or even a church) that became the headquarters for its meetings.2 Establishing a 'mont' simply meant arranging the setting up of a certain amount of capital (chattels and real estate ) the revenue of which was to guarantee reaching certain targets established by statute.3 This was not a prerogative reserved exclusively for the guilds of Rome since such guilds had spread far and wide into every country district and throughout the cities of the kingdom, especially those lying on the coast.
