Proceedings of the 9th International Conference on Research in Social Sciences
Year: 2024
DOI:
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Traces of Slave Girls and Male Slaves in Tuscany
Prof. Dr. Sheyla Moroni
ABSTRACT:
The sites of third millennium slavery in Italy often overlap with those of slavery in the 16th, 17th and 18th centuries. Italy is sometimes reticent on the subject, and silence on trafficking seems to be a way not only of erasing the past but also of concealing the present. In his study of Oriental slaves in Italy, Bongi dates the appearance of these girls in Tuscany to 1350, attributing it to one of the many consequences of the plague of 1348. The trade – which often reached Genoa and Venice, cities to which the Florentine buyers turned – then continued for at least four centuries (although the numbers were not always constant). The young women were often Slavs, but sometimes from South-East Asia. Their stay in the cities of Lucca and Florence is commemorated by a few paintings, but above all by the stories of their children, often born to their masters and abandoned in the Orphanage of the Innocents, now a museum. The male slaves, on the other hand, were taken to Livorno, where they waited for ships bound for other destinations or stayed to work in the port. A famous monument, some detention centres and a series of novels and travel diaries, mainly Anglo-Saxon and Russian, bear witness to this passage. Today, the first route seems to be taken again by groups of Slavic women in search of work, while the second remains the preserve of men, mainly from the African continent and parts of Asia.
keywords: Public History, museums, statues, Florence, Livorno