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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Campana Bastiano
1547Agent and factor of Duke Cosimo I de' Medici. In 1547 he was sent to Portugal to purchase for the duke goods, animals and enslaved people destined for the court of Florence. His diary contains the accounts of those purchases.
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Camusso Carlos
1796–1802Agent of Benito Patron's company in Montevideo.
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Camusso José
1789–1803Born in Cádiz, he took part in the slave trade together with his brother Carlos, in collaboration with Benito Patron's company.
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Caneva Andrea
1776–1804He arrived in Buenos Aires in 1776 and married Juana Balerga there. He was a merchant and owned two shops, two houses, half a ship and nine enslaved people.
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Carletti Francesco (e Antonio)
1594–1595Francesco Carletti and his father Antonio bought 80 licences, at 25 ducats each, to transport enslaved people from Cape Verde to the Indies. They bought 75 people, two thirds of them male, paying 100 scudi each in order to resell them at 170. Having left San Jacopo on 19 April 1595, after thirty days they arrived at Cartagena. Many of the people transported died during the voyage, and others arrived ill; Francesco states that he lost 40% of the capital invested. From Cartagena, where in February the goods they had sent from Spain for Peru had also arrived, they went on to Panama and from there embarked for Lima. In Lima they sold, for a total of 1,600 scudi, four of the enslaved people, who had meanwhile recovered and had travelled with them. They then sold the rest of the merchandise in exchange for some silver bars of 70-80 pounds each.
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Carmelino Angel
1800–1830In the Lima census of 1813 three enslaved people are recorded in his household. In his will of 1816, however, he declared that he owned five: José, Juan, Dolores, Marco and Félix.
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Carmelino Angelo
from 1813An Italian immigrant attested in Lima from at least 1813, the year of his marriage, he became the owner of an inn and owned five enslaved people.
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An employee of the Cambini, together with his brother Chiaro he purchased an enslaved African woman, Luza, who had come to Livorno from Lisbon through Bartolomeo Marchionni.
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Castellon Tomas
1509–1527Brother of Jacome Castellon, after serving as agent of the Genoese community of Seville in Hispaniola he acquired a property in Puerto Rico, where he established the first sugar-cane plantation.
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Cattaneo Alessandro
1506–1550Son of Cesare Cattaneo, in 1506 he rented a house in Seville; around 1508 he was trading with Santo Domingo and in the 1510s with the Cape Verde archipelago. In 1512 he formed with Giuliano Calvi and Stefano Centurione a company that entrusted him with textiles, wine and ship's biscuit worth 1,000 gold ducats, to be taken to the island of Santiago, in Cape Verde, in exchange for enslaved people. In 1513 he sold some enslaved people brought from the African coast to another Genoese merchant of Seville, Giovan Francesco Grimaldi, who transported them to the New World. In 1550 he signed an asiento with the Crown, managed in Seville by two of his brothers, Nicolas and Visconte, who owned the ship Trinidad. Another relative, Jeronimo, handled the trade between Seville and Mexico and in turn had an agent, Juan, in Mexico City.
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Cattaneo Nicoluso (Nicolas)
1514–1550In June 1514 Francisco Garay, a member of the municipal council of Santo Domingo, authorised Nicoluso Cattaneo to procure for him twelve enslaved Christian people for Hispaniola. In 1536 he received permission to introduce 76 enslaved people into the Americas in exchange for the 226,400 maravedís that the government had confiscated from him that same year as a forced loan. In the 1540s and 1550s, with the vessel Trinidad and in partnership with Vivaldo, he made several voyages between the African coasts and Veracruz.
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Cavaleri Pietro Mattia
1668–1674Agent of the Grillo and Lomellini asiento in the islands of Cuba, Puerto Rico and Santo Domingo. He had previously operated in Madrid as a private lender and as a merchant through a company based in Genoa, together with his partner Bartolomeo Capa. He began working for Grillo in 1664, if not earlier, supervising the delivery of almost 125,000 pesos from Cartagena to Italy, part of a loan that Grillo had granted to the Crown.
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Centurione (Centurion) Gaspar
1514–1526Together with Francisco Grimaldi (or Grimaldo), he bought a licence to send a small group of enslaved people to Hispaniola. He also undertook to ship the enslaved people for the Genoese company (Forne, Vivaldo and Vazquez) that had purchased Gouvenot's licence.
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Centurione (Centurion) Melchor
1518–1526Brother of Gaspar, he was the agent of Forne, Vivaldo and Vazquez in Santo Domingo, where he exchanged enslaved people for sugar.
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Owner, together with Claudio Picaluga and Giovanni Zangroni, of the ship Amable Claudina and its cargo. Having sailed from Bordeaux bound for La Guaira, the ship was intercepted by the Royal Navy and the case was judged by the Mixed Commission of Sierra Leone.
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Cibo Carlo
1820–1860A Genoese, grocer in Regla, near Havana. His shop was a point of reference for the slave traders arriving on the island. He hosted in Cuba the slave trader of Franco-Italian origin Theodore Canot. He was also co-owner of the ship Areostatico, employed in the illegal slave trade, which in 1826 transported 108 enslaved people to Havana.
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Colombo Cristoforo
1493He sent to Giannotto Berardi, partner of Bartolomeo Marchionni in Seville, the first known shipment of enslaved people from the Americas to Europe: Indigenous Taíno people.
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Compiano Francesco Maria
1663–1674An agent of Grillo and Lomellini, he distributed enslaved Africans to Spanish ports such as Veracruz, Portobelo, Caracas, Cartagena de Indias and Cumaná. Before joining the asiento he had organised illegal expeditions to sell enslaved people between Cádiz, the Canaries, Curaçao and Portobelo. In 1665, during the contracts between Grillo and Lomellini and the Company of Royal Adventurers, the English company that held the monopoly of trade with Africa, including the slave trade, he also travelled to Jamaica and Barbados.
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Crosa (famiglia)
1751–1800 (part of century)The Crosa invested in the Compañía Gaditana de Negros, managed by the Enrile family.
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D'Andrea Stefano
1668–1672He replaced Francesco Feroni as Grillo's agent in Amsterdam, where he bought enslaved people for the asiento and purchased other goods to be sent to America.
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Dal Borgo Federico
1539Agent of the Strozzi company in Seville, in 1539 he received from the sovereign the licence to transport enslaved people and goods to America.
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dalla Man Isach
1763–1768From about 1763 he started a direct trade in glass beads between Venice and Liverpool, entering into relations with the Company of Merchants Trading to Africa and, in 1766-1767, with the slave-trading house William Davenport & Co., of which he was a supplier with shipments from Venice and from the Livorno branch. In 1768 the Venetian authorities excluded him from this trade, accusing him of having delivered beads of poor quality.
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De la Terola y Jordan Agustín
1753–1763Also known as Agustín de la Terola or Agustín Jordan, he was born in Finale, in the Republic of Genoa, the legitimate son of Joseph de la Terola y Jordan and Ana Maria Gordona y Graterola. Between 1755 and 1763 he is documented in three transactions involving enslaved people.
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De Negron Carlos
1536–1540Son of a Genoese who had arrived in Seville at the beginning of the sixteenth century and been naturalised. A graduate in law, he was also active in the slave trade: he owned two galleons that sailed between Africa and Veracruz. He married a prominent member of the Sevillian nobility. He was later appointed legal adviser to the tribunal of the Inquisition, then fiscal of the Council of the Indies and finally of the Council of Castile. His seven children became important officials or landowners.
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Del Forno Pietro
1660–1679 (decade)A Genoese merchant settled in Cádiz, in the 1660s and 1670s he was a partner in the expeditions of the asiento ships bound for the Caribbean. The same network included Giovanni Battista Porrata, Giovanni Rolato, the brothers Giovanni Battista and Pantaleo Grasso, Giovanni Battista Priaruggia and Alberto Bieluto.