The Swiss Community in Genoa from the Old Regime to the Late Nineteenth Century

The citizens of the Swiss Confederacy were part of an overall migratory movement, although sources do not allow any reliable estimate of its size until well into the seventeenth century. Like migrants from other countries, the Swiss were employed in a variety of trades and professions in the seventeenth and the eighteenth centuries. In the case of the Italian peninsula, poor migrants travelled alongside a smaller élite migration whose baggage included technical knowhow and, often, small financial capital. Whereas poor migrants gravitated to developed regions, élite migrants sought new opportunities in areas which offered large and open markets without where local competition was weak, such as southern Italy. Many élite migrants came from large urban centres, such as Geneva, Basel, St. Gallen and Zurich, and from economically dynamic regions such as Appenzell and Glarus, and the better educated Protestant cantons. The military constituted an important group within the overall migration movement and one that included both poor and élite migrants. Throughout the seventeenth century no less than fifty-thousand Swiss citizens were engaged in military service outside the territory of the Confederacy. Recent studies on the military history of the Republic of Genoa also indicate the importance of Swiss soldiers from the late sixteenth century. Their activities in the other Italian states is less documented, but was probably similar to the situation in Genoa. Swiss entrepreneurs as well as lower-class Swiss workers, labourers, and petty traders can also be found in the archival sources of most Italian cities from the mid-eighteenth century onwards. By the turn of the century, a good number of them had reached the upper echelons of the trading and the financial world, though they carefully cultivated their Swiss distinctiveness by maintaining privileged relations with their cantons of provenance, by keeping their original language, and a loyalty to family connections that generally that resulted in self-perpetuating circular marriage strategies.