The Court of Auditors in the Kingdom of Sicily

This work focuses on the Neapolitan Jus Regni and judicial activities of the baronial courts in the Kingdom of Napoli during the early modern period; and in particular, the thorny activity of applying the law in the provincial territories in which individual cases could be subject to different procedural methods deriving from the statutory legislation in effect in each. A privileged insight into these dynamics comes from a precious source: a collection of sentences passed by a governor, during his service at feudal tribunals in the Barony of Cilento. It allows us to analyse the precise act of the interpretatio of the laws with the aim of harmonising local (statutory) law, the ius commune and the King's law, as well as to identify the reference jurisprudence used by the magistrate.

Estudios geográficos, 2023

This study aims to investigate the presence of cadastres in municipal finance in the 16th-17th centuries, a time when indirect taxes such as duties and gabelle had become prevalent, and census surveys were longer necessary for assessment purposes. The Kingdom of Naples, in southern Italy, was chosen as a case study due to the wealth of documentary sources still available for studying local finance. The focus of the study is the land registers of the 15th-17th centuries to try to define how they were made at the local level before the reform ordered by Charles of Bourbon in the 1740s and aims to understand how wealth was assessed, the tax base was used, and the collection mechanisms employed. Our investigation includes all the cadastral documents that can help answer these questions, without relying on a single case study as the definitive model for an entire system. The method adopted is the comparative one which takes advantage of the comparison between cases and cadastral models both the ancient ones and those of the reform of Charles of Bourbon. The key to understanding the research lies in the relationship between law and practice, especially the interplay between the laws codified by the Government through pragmatica laws, edicts, and instructions, on the one hand, and cadastral practices in force at the municipal level during a period when local particularism could benefit from sovereign respect for the customs of communities.

, cclxix + 570pp, Hbk € 70, ISBN 978-8883344985.

The Transition in Europe between XVII and XVIII centuries. Perspectives and case studies, edited by A. Álvarez-Ossorio, C. Cremonini, E. Riva, Milano, FrancoAngeli, 2016

Paper published in the book 'The emergence of tradition'. Essays on legal anthropology, XVI-XVIII centuries, Venice, Cafoscarina, 2015, pp. 63-100., 2015

The paper deals with the life of the jurist Giovan Maria Bertolli who represents a significant and paradigmatic example of the rise of a parvenu in a society still deeply marked by status and privilege. Towards the end of the 1650s Bertolli moved from Vicenza to Venice with his whole family. The climate of those years was favorable for this son of an obscure carpenter determined to make his way in the complicated maze that was Venetian power. In the dominant city Bertolli could find his great opportunity with the forensic activity exercised in the Venetian courts. Personal and family relations developed both in the dominant city and in his native city, helped him to practice an activity carried on in close contact with the complex network of Venetian magistracies. But he made his real leap to fame in 1684, when, he was elected Consultore in iure, an office which reflected to the highest degree both the specific dimension of the Venetian state and the features of Venice’s legal system. Giovan Maria Bertolli acted as consultore in iure from 1684 to 1707, the year of his death. Though his juridical backing was Romanistic, in the course of decades of legal practice spent in the Dominante, he soon acquired a thorough knowledge of the Veneto legal system as well as of the political dynamics that animated the Venetian ruling class.

Parliaments, Estates and Representation, 2014

This article is intended to link the institutional processes completed in Sicily between the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries with important international political events in which Sicilians were involved during the first part of the reign of Frederick III (1296-1321). At the end of this long period of conflict, the Sicilians managed to end the War of the Vespers, which began in 1282, and to establish a hereditary 'national' monarchy (Status Siciliae), independent of the hegemonic aims of the papacy and of the Anjous and characterized by constitutional cooperation between crown and parliament. Frederick had taken the crown by the Sicilian representatives swearing loyalty to the fundamental laws (1296) and he was able to choose his successor, Peter of Aragon, to the throne, only after he too had taken the same oath (1321). The Peace of Caltabellotta (1302) occurred between these two events. This peace gave only a partial and very unstable recognition of the Sicilian intentions, but the 1312 treaty with Emperor Henry VII finally legitimized, by a higher civil authority, this first attempt to establish a 'national' and 'constitutional' Sicilian kingdom. This article aims to reconstruct the intertwinement of the parliament 1 and the crown of Sicily during the first part of the reign of Frederick III (1296-1321). Flavio Silvestrini, University of Rome-La Sapienza 1 For ease of writing and in accordance with the historiography on that subject, the word 'parliament' is used to mean both the periodic representatives' meetings and the political institution that included nobles, representatives of demesne towns and, rarely, members of the clergy in Sicily; while taking into account the difference, at the institutional level, between 'pre-parliaments' and true 'parliaments'