The Roman Stock Exchange between the 19th and 20th Centuries. A History of the Italian Stock Market

The goal of the author, Donatella Strangio, consists of a serious and documented analysis of the evolution of the city through a particular observatory, that of the Stock Exchange, considered not so much as an exclusive or absolute protagonist of the financial market, but rather as a subject and object of the history, certainly economic, but also social and political, of Rome and the Papal State. In addition, this singular observa tory, despite its atypical nature, seems to be valuable for the purposes of an overall analysis of the behaviour of the local, national and international executive and entrepreneurial classes. Focussing on six key historical moments, the book starts from the decline in the Pope’s temporal power—the aforementioned breach of Porta Pia-: an epochal event, here linked to previous institutional and social transformations as well as to the level of nineteenth–twentieth century internal and external relations. As the subtitle of the work explic itly states (Structure and activity of the Rome stock market between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries: a history of the Italian stockexchange), the periodization adopted by the Author is also unconventional. Starting from 1821—and nevertheless attentive to some important pre-existing joints—Strangio examines the dynamics triggered by the Commerce Regulations to clarify how the Roman stock exchange reacted with respect to the Risorgimento and subsequently to the establishment of the Kingdom of Italy. Embracing both the liberal period and that of the “Belle époque”, the study finally reaches the First World War (as the author recalls, it was with the Great War that the “long nineteenth century” ended and a new system of contacts and of exchanges appeared, thanks to which the Eternal City abandoned the welfare model that had distinguished it most in previous centuries), and then proceeds to the following decades. This long-term approach allows Donatella Strangio to convincingly demonstrate how, far from confining it to a more restricted space, becoming the Italian capital greatly facilitated the evolution of the urban development trends in Rome, finally released from the nefarious effects of the papal public debt, from which it had suffered for some time, aggravated by the “amputation” of the territory of the Patrimony of St. Peter, after 1861. The rhythms imposed by being the capital influenced all sectors and economic sectors of the city, from industry to the tertiary sector. Rome Capital City therefore traces the historical evolution of the legislation that is the object of its investigation, the role of financial inter mediaries, and the functions of the decision-making and control bodies that were part of the Rome Stock Exchange, in particular in light of the consolidation of the British capitalist model and the Northern European one. An unusual picture emerges, a picture that portrays the complex finan cial mechanisms of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries but also the broad world of Roman entrepreneurship, which, moreover, can benefit from the in-depth analysis of stock exchanges between 1860 and 1870, as well as share prices up to the Great War, the Depression and the consolidation of the Fascist period.