Ricerc@Sapienza

We present new wage indices for skilled and unskilled construction workers in Italy. Our data avoid multiple issues pestering earlier wages, making our new indices the first consistent ones for early-modern Italy. Our improved wages, obtained from the St. Peter’s Church in Rome, consolidate the view that urban Italy began a prolonged downturn during the seventeenth century. They also offer sustenance to the idea that epidemics instigated the decline. Comparison with new construction wages for London shows that Roman workers outearned their early-modern English counterparts.

This article presents an early modern wage index for stable rural male workers in the Grand Duchy of Tuscany. These wages highlight the importance of distinguishing between locations and contract types when considering historical workers’ living standards, and they speak to a longstanding debate about whether Italy’s early modern downturn was purely an urban phenomenon, or an all-embracing one. Our data lend support to the former view, since we do not detect any downturn in our early modern rural wages. This observation informs the little divergence debate.