People database
People from the Italian peninsula involved in the Atlantic slave trade and slavery, 15th–19th centuries. Search by name or filter by role, place, network and period.
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Del Rosso Lorenzo
1548–1570In 1548 Lorenzo del Rosso and Francisco “Rucho” obtained a licence to transport thirty-five enslaved Africans to the Indies, paid for in all 105,000 maravedís, equivalent to 280 ducats, and received silver in return. Between 1569 and 1579 Del Rosso transported a further 230 enslaved people to the Americas.
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Di San Giuliano Francesco
1569–1579Between 1569 and 1579 he sent 250 enslaved people to America.
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Enrile Geronimo
1769–1782Born in Cádiz in 1730, son of José María, in 1769 he made his first voyage to Havana and Puerto Rico to look after the interests of the Compañía Gaditana de Negros, and in 1773 he returned to Cuba as director of the company. In 1776 he was again in Havana to oversee his father's investment in a London company that imported enslaved people. In 1778, still in Cuba, he obtained the title of Marquis of Casa Enrile. In 1782, during the American War of Independence, in which Spain was allied with France against England, he obtained a special permit to import enslaved people into Cuba on neutral ships.
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Enrile Jose Maria
1765–1779He was among the first partners of the Compañía Gaditana de Negros, which received from the Crown the exclusive privilege of the slave trade to the Americas from 1765 to 1779. The company, which operated first from Puerto Rico and then from Cuba, also invested in the buying and selling of grain, sugar, coffee, timber and other goods. Enrile also invested in a London company that imported enslaved people into Cuba.
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Fantoni Mauro
1512–1550He was born in Seville, probably in 1512, to Iacopo from Florence and Antonia Gonçales from Portugal. His father had arrived in Andalusia in 1506 and entered the city's lucrative trade in collaboration with other Florentine merchants, becoming the go-to contact for many Tuscan traders active in Seville. In 1532, Iacopo sent his eldest son, Bernardo, to Florence, while Mauro continued to trade with the Americas. A few years later, to reduce the risk of seizures and confiscations, and to take advantage of opportunities in the New World, Iacopo decided to send Mauro to Santo Domingo. This seems to have been prompted by the heirs of Luigi Ricasoli wanting to send a representative to the island to conclude business begun with Galeotto Cei. Fantoni arrived in Santo Domingo between 1541 and 1542, probably spending the rest of his life in the Caribbean. In June 1543, he married Maria Giustiniani, who was from Genoa. He joined the company of Luigi da Lampugnano, Giovan Antonio Piccolomini, and Scipione Pecci to fish for pearls on the island of Cubagua. The company purchased the galleon San Andrés, commanded by Juan Sodo, and Fantoni sent four enslaved men to the Caribbean to work in the enterprise through him. Fantoni sent two of them — Alonso, aged twenty-four, and Juan Marcos, aged twenty — while Pecci assigned a black man named Francisco, aged about twenty-five, to the company. Juan Sodo chose Pedro, who was also twenty-five years old. The contract stipulated that the four men should receive a monthly wage of 1,000 maravedís, as well as food and drink.
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Feroni Francesco
1660–1670Born in Empoli between 1614 and 1616, he moved to Livorno, where he worked for the merchant and senator Lorenzo Buonaccorsi, who probably sent him to Amsterdam. There he first took part in the grain trade to Italy, and above all to Livorno, where in 1645 he managed to send 1,650 tons of Baltic grain by chartering sixteen ships; further shipments followed. He became an important figure in the Italian community of Amsterdam, and Ferdinando II asked him to represent him before the States General. In the meantime he diversified his business: he entered the trade with Portugal, to which he exported linen and textiles and from which he imported Brazilian sugar and salt, and he was one of the main importers of Spanish wool into the United Provinces. His most profitable trade, however, was the slave trade. He invested part of the profits from the grain trade in the purchase of a ship, the Speranza, which carried textiles and alcoholic drinks to Guinea in exchange for enslaved people; after they had been sold in America, on the return voyage the Speranza carried sugar, cocoa, tobacco and gold ingots to Europe. His commercial successes depended on his good relations with the Dutch West India Company. From 1662 he took part in the Grillo and Lomellini asiento, bringing enslaved people from Guinea to the Caribbean.
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Ferrari Cayetan
1822Although he was already deceased, he appears in the proceedings of the Juzgado de Secuestros in Lima. His assets, which were valued at 8,000 pesos, included money, jewellery, enslaved people, and the furnishings of his fonda on Calle de Mercaderes.
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Ferrari Francesco
1601–1700 (century)A Florentine merchant resident in Amsterdam, in the seventeenth century he formed with the Genoese merchants of Cádiz Domenico Recagno, Bartolomeo Grillo and Ambrogio Lomellini a company that organised the transport of enslaved people to American ports.
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Fornari (Forne) Domingo
1518–1526With his brother Tomas, Augustin de Vivaldo and Fernan Vazquez he bought the licence that the King of Spain had granted to Gouvenot to bring 4,000 enslaved people to the Americas in eight years. It is not known how many people they sold, but they resold the licences at very high prices, making a profit of 300,000 ducats. The same company, with Genoese and Spanish capital, owned the ingenio of Sanctis Spiritu, just outside Santo Domingo.
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Fornari (Forne) Tomas
1518–1526With his brother Domingo, Augustin de Vivaldo and Fernan Vazquez he bought the licence that the King of Spain had granted to Gouvenot to bring 4,000 enslaved people to the Americas in eight years. It is not known how many people they sold, but they resold the licences at very high prices, making a profit of 300,000 ducats. The same company, with Genoese and Spanish capital, owned the ingenio of Sanctis Spiritu, just outside Santo Domingo.
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Fragoso Jacom (Giacomo)
c. 1591–1621A merchant originally from Recco, he traded between Lima, Arequipa and Puno in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Alongside other goods he sold enslaved people procured for him by the Genoese Camilo Bonafante, resident first in Callao and then in Arica.
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Gaggero Pedro
1729–1741A Genoese active in the Spanish territories of America, he privately purchased enslaved people («compra particular de Negros») from Nicolás Alfonso Serrano in the years when the asiento de negros was managed by the English company.
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Gallino Domingo
1800–1826At the beginning of the nineteenth century, he appears in the census of enslaved people as a merchant and the owner of three enslaved individuals. Through trade (he opened a wholesale outlet) he purchased two buildings in the city, in calle Belgrano, and two properties in the vicinity of Buenos Aires: an estancia, where he raised cattle, sheep and horses, and a large plot with timber woods. During the war, he lent the government 408 cows, 123 horses, and eight enslaved people, worth 11,000 pesos. These were returned to the family in 1831.
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Before entering the service of Grillo and Lomellini he had served in the Armada Real and in the naval squadron of the Prince of Montesarchio. He began his career representing Grillo and Lomellini in Cádiz, where he supervised the work of other factors and organised the city's naval resources. In 1667, on the initiative of Ambrogio Lomellini, he left for the Indies as a factor; having reached Cartagena de Indias, he began to sail with the company's ships in the Caribbean. Between 1671 and 1672 he transported 1,563 enslaved people between the ports of Curaçao, Portobelo, Veracruz and Cartagena, always aboard the Santa Cruz.
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Gaso Nicolas
1800–1825Bartolo Gaso, born in the Kingdom of Genoa, the legitimate son of Nicolas Gaso and Maria Gaso (AGN, Protocolo 635, 1819). In his will he declared that he owned several enslaved people; for María Teresa, purchased for 490 pesos, he directed that she be sold for no more than 400 pesos and not outside the city, in reward for her good services. Between 1800 and 1818 he is also documented in eight transactions involving enslaved people.
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Ghinetti Piero
1470In 1470 he sent an enslaved African woman to Livorno to be sold to the Cambini.
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Ginori Lorenzo
1675A Florentine merchant and agent active in Lisbon, in 1675 he was commissioned by Cosimo III de' Medici to procure and send to Florence a young Black or Brazilian man skilled in the processing of sugar cane.
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Giraldi Niccolò
c. 1550Participation in the slave trade and in other business in Atlantic exchanges enabled his family to enter the Portuguese nobility in the mid-sixteenth century, to purchase the captaincy of Ilhéus and to win the favour of the Lisbon court.
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Giustiniani Esteban
1520–1535An agent of the company of Vivaldi, Forne and Grimaldi, he settled in Santo Domingo, where together with Pedro Vazquez de Mella he purchased a sugar plantation that became very productive. At the end of the 1520s he founded his own company, Giustiniani & Co., which traded in enslaved people and land. His partners were probably Melchor Centurione and Valian de Forne, already his partners in other operations.
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Giustiniani Giustiniano
1663–1704From 1663 to 1674 Giustiniani served on the Isthmus of Panama as an agent of the Grillo and Lomellini asiento. His duties included the logistics of the slave trade: he received the asiento ships arriving at Portobelo, assessed the state of health of the captives, saw to their sustenance, sold them in the local markets and organised their transfer across the isthmus to Panama. He was thus involved in twenty-five asiento voyages that reached the isthmus, and was responsible for the lives of almost 11,500 captives. After the end of the Grillo and Lomellini asiento he married a noblewoman from Navarre and returned with her to Spain, to Madrid. He nevertheless continued to be involved in the slave trade through his close collaboration with his brother-in-law Antonio Echeverz, who at the beginning of the eighteenth century had become one of the most powerful men on the isthmus, a great owner of land and of enslaved people. In the first months of 1692 the Venetian Nicolás Porcio, a key figure in the asiento since the late 1670s, appointed Giustiniani chief administrator of the asiento in the event of his death, which occurred two years later. With the proceeds of the slave trade Giustiniani purchased government offices and titles from the Crown: honorary offices in the Council of Italy and the Council of War (1684), the office of provincial alcalde of Panama and Portobelo (1685), the habit of knight of the Order of Calatrava (1692), and the titles of Marquis of Peñaflorida and Viscount of Casares (1704).
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Giustiniano Giovanni Battista
1646–1671Agent of the Genoese Domenico Grillo between the 1650s and 1670s, he operated in Cádiz, Seville and Madrid to buy, sell and charter the ships of the asiento and to receive and manage the return cargoes, linking the decisions of the asentistas to port and commercial logistics.
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Grasso Giovanni Battista
1660–1679 (decade)A Genoese merchant active in Cádiz, in the 1660s and 1670s he took part in the expeditions of the asiento ships to the Caribbean together with his brother Pantaleo Grasso and the partners Giovanni Battista Porrata, Giovanni Rolato, Pietro Del Forno, Giovanni Battista Priaruggia and Alberto Bieluto, who formed a single Cádiz network.
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Grasso Pantaleo
1660–1679 (decade)A Genoese merchant active in Cádiz, in the 1660s and 1670s he took part in the expeditions of the asiento ships to the Caribbean together with his brother Giovanni Battista Grasso and the partners Giovanni Battista Porrata, Giovanni Rolato, Pietro Del Forno, Giovanni Battista Priaruggia and Alberto Bieluto.
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Grillo Agostino
1663–1674A distant relative of Domenico Grillo, he took part in the asiento as an agent, first in Portobelo (1663-1670) and then in Lima (1671-1673).
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Grillo Bartolome
1800–1820Born in San Maurizio di Genova, the legitimate son of Francisco Grillo and Francisca Calandra (AGN, Protocolo 84, 1808). Between 1805 and 1807 he is documented in three transactions involving enslaved people.