From practices of social assistance to banking activities. The case of the Neapolitan hospitals and Monte di Pietà (14th - 17th centuries)

The intervention will start from the late Middle Age to make a brief mention of the interventions in the field of poverty, with reference to the demand and the offer of services of assistance institutions in Naples. We will then show how, in the second half of the sixteenth century, at a time of serious economic difficulty for the Kingdom and the assistance institutions, and for a wide range of economic, financial and credit activities, the banks dealt with critical economic circumstances . The need to find new financial sources will induce some institutions to diversify services and open public money-issuing banks. We will conclude by discussing the difficulties confronted by the institutions involved in combining charity with banking, from which the need to separate the two activities in order to avoid compromising the life of the institutions, and even more so the whole economic, financial and credit system of the Kingdom.