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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Rolato Giovanni
1661–1663A Genoese merchant and partner of the asiento in Cádiz between 1661 and 1662, he was investigated for smuggling in the Indies. He belonged to the same trading network as Giovanni Battista Porrata and the other Cádiz partners who took part in the slave-trading expeditions in the Caribbean, including the Grasso brothers, Pietro Del Forno, Giovanni Battista Priaruggia and Alberto Bieluto.
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Rondinelli Piero
1485–1520A Florentine merchant, he was called by Donato Nicolini to direct in Seville the trading company that had belonged to Giannotto Berardi and that, on the latter's death, had passed to Amerigo Vespucci. He traded in enslaved people on behalf of Marchionni and Cesare Barzi. Besides the slave trade, he dealt in Canary sugar, English woollen cloth, Italian silk fabrics and many other products.
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Rossi Juan Bautista
1784A trustee and business agent, in Madrid he collected the income from the Real Compañía de La Habana, deeply involved in the Cuban slave economy, due to the Infante Fernando, Duke of Parma: 3 and one-third shares, which came from the estate of Elisabeth Farnese. The dividend, 83 and one-third pesos, equal to 1,268 reales de vellón, was collected on 30 July 1784.
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Rovellasca Giovanni Battista
1583–1599From 1583 to 1589 he held the contract for the trade in enslaved people from the island of São Tomé to the Antilles. Between 1595 and 1599 he purchased a licence to import 230 enslaved people into Cartagena de Indias.
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Sacio Antonio
1798–1825He was a Genoese merchant in Lima who married Gertrudis Poleo, the daughter of another Genoese man named Bartolomé Poleo. She brought a dowry of around 13,000 pesos to the marriage, but in 1822 he claimed that her contribution was actually worth around 24,000 pesos — 11,000 pesos more than the dowry. His properties included four cajones (shops) on the Ribera, bodegas on Calle Aldabas, Mantas and Portal de Botoneros, as well as properties rented on Calle Pescadería and Calle Santo Toribio. In his early years of business, he traded brandy from the Ica Valley. He also owned two pulperías (grocery shops). In 1825 he married, as his third wife, Toribia Poleo, who brought him a dowry of about 16,000 pesos, including three enslaved people worth 780 pesos.
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Saluzzi Giacomo
1632–1636Through his representative, Antonio Balbi, he claimed the dividends of a shipment of enslaved Africans undertaken together with Antonio del Campo and Benavidez. He also claimed 84,500 ducats for the cargoes shipped to the Indies in 1632. He appears also to have benefited from the licences granted by the court of Philip IV in the 1630s, which links him directly to those granted to Nicola Salvago.
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Salvago Ambrogio (o Ambrosio)
1603–1609At the beginning of the seventeenth century he invested, together with Francesco Serra, in the asiento of the Portuguese Gonzalo Baez Coutinho.
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Salvago Benedetto
1401–1500 (century)A fifteenth-century member of the Salvago merchant family, he owned an enslaved person engaged in domestic service. He appears with his relative Brunetto Salvago in the notarial records because he provided for the manumission of that person and assigned that person a share of the inheritance.
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Salvago Brunetto
1401–1500 (century)A fifteenth-century member of the Salvago merchant family, he owned an enslaved person employed in domestic service. He appears with his relative Benedetto Salvago in the notarial records because he provided for the manumission of that person and assigned that person a share of the inheritance.
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Salvago Carlo
1639–1659On the death of his brother Nicola, in 1639, he inherited all his property and sought to obtain further licences to bring enslaved people to Buenos Aires. With his brother Enrico he used the Regia Camera of Milan to exchange the silver he brought from the Americas, and he entered the wool trade between Spain and Genoa.
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Salvago Cristobal
1490–1500He traded in enslaved people with the Canary Islands.
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Salvago Enrico
1633–1635A Genoese merchant, between 1633 and 1635 he fitted out and dispatched a ship from Genoa to Brazil via Lisbon, perhaps making use of the licences and the slave asiento of his relative Nicola Salvago; it is not certain that he held an authorisation of his own.
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Salvago Luca
1490–1500Owner of a sugar plantation in Madeira.
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Salvago Nicola
1630–1649In 1630 Nicola Salvago purchased from the Cardinal-Infante, who in turn had obtained them from his brother Philip IV, a batch of licences to sell 1,500 enslaved people in Buenos Aires. In 1634 he obtained from the Casa de la Contratación of Seville permission to bring another 1,000 to the same city, and in 1638 he purchased a further 335 licences for the same traffic. He also introduced many enslaved people into Buenos Aires illegally, often on his own ships such as the Santísima Trinidad.
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Salvago Stefano
1530–1539 (decade)A Genoese businessman and factor in Seville for the banker Ansaldo Grimaldi, in the 1530s he took part in trading and credit companies between Madrid, Valladolid and Seville and became an influential asentista. The sources expressly mention his asientos for the slave trade. He also operated with Antonio Grimaldi and with Tomasso Salvago, another factor of the same network.
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Salvago Tomasso
1450A member of the Salvago merchant family, on 28 April 1450 he purchased an enslaved person in Genoa from Geronimo de Carmarino, as documented by a notarial deed. He is a different person from the Tomasso Salvago active as factor for Ansaldo Grimaldi in Seville in 1530.
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Salviati Lorenzo
1601A Florentine marquis, in 1601 he obtained from Philip III the privilege of the so-called giurì di Spagna, that is, the right to collect the duties on the sale and trade of enslaved Black people transported to the West Indies. The proceeds and credits connected with this duty later passed into the assets of the Monte di Pietà of Florence.
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Owners of an enslaved African woman, one of the three whom Giovanni Guidetti sent from Lisbon to Livorno on the caravel Santo Spirito at the end of 1464.
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A real cédula signed by the king in 1555 expressly authorised him to take with him to the Indies, to Puerto Rico, six enslaved Black people as personal servants. The document associates him with Antonio Merlo as a member of the same family of Italian origin.
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A member of the House of Assembly of Jamaica, he came from a Jewish family of Italian origin. He owned a plantation in St. Ann, where 18 enslaved people worked, two plantations in St. Catherine, with about 15 enslaved people, and perhaps one in St. John. He was the father of Jacob J. Sanguinetti and Caroline Blanche Lucretia Sanguinetti.
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Sauli Franceso Maria
1620–1699Francesco Maria Sauli operated in Genoa on behalf of Grillo and Lomellini: he received and sold the goods arriving from Cádiz, procured credit and insured the asiento ships. His activity, however, went far beyond this: he invested in Roman and Neapolitan public debt, traded in grain, silver, silk textiles and marble, and invested in the Genoese shipyards. In 1666 he supplied Grillo and Lomellini with galleons of 500 tons each for the slave trade. In 1667 he procured for Feroni, in Amsterdam, funds to buy enslaved people for the asiento. At the beginning of 1668 Grillo asked him to insure the ship Santa Cruz, of 500 tons, with 34 guns and a crew of 70 men, commanded by Giovanni Francesco Garibaldo: the ship was to sail from Cádiz to Angola, load enslaved people there and carry them to Curaçao, Santo Domingo and Puerto Rico, perhaps also to Cumaná and Caracas, and then transport silver from Cádiz to Genoa. In March 1668 Sauli won the tender for the insurance.
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Scala Giambattista
1840–1850Born in Chiavari in 1817 to a family of sailors, he left school at the age of twelve to go to sea with his father. Having obtained his captain's licence in Genoa, he made trading voyages between the Ligurian port and Brazil, with at least two calls in West Africa around 1846. The suspicion of his involvement in the slave trade dates from this period. The main source of the accusation is the British consul Benjamin Campbell, who met Scala in Freetown in 1853 and reported to the British Foreign Secretary that he recognised him as one of those skilful and cunning Genoese captains who sailed under the Sardinian flag and had repeatedly eluded the patrols of the Royal Navy. He was later Italian consul in Lagos; in 1862 he published in Sampierdarena the memoirs of a journey he had made to Abeokuta in 1858.
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Secchi Jean
1878–1879Between 1878 and 1879 Secchi and his associates, Pantin, Lecavallerie, Texidor, Larrabide and Jimenez, transported to Cuba groups of seven to forty people at a time, of Indian, Chinese and Venezuelan origin, as indentured servants.
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Serra Baltasar
c. 1691–1700A member of the Ligurian patrician family of the Serra, active in the Spanish administration. He was appointed juez conservador of the monopoly of the asiento de negros, with the task of protecting the legal privileges and commercial interests connected with the introduction and sale of enslaved Black people in the American colonies.
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Serra Francesco
1603–1609He invested in the slave asiento of the Portuguese Gonzalo Báez Coutinho together with Ambrogio Salvago, but did not take part in the logistical management of the activities.