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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Basi Francisco
1764–1804The Buenos Aires census of 1804 records that he arrived in the city in 1764. He was a miller and owned two enslaved people and 2,000 pesos in silver. He lived in a rented house.
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Bassignana (Basiñana) Pedro Benito
1520–1540He formed a partnership with the cleric Alvaro de Castro at Concepción (Hispaniola), who had obtained permission to introduce 200 enslaved people into the island for the plantations of the area, including those of Castro himself. When the agreement with Castro ended, Bassignana obtained further licences to bring enslaved people to Cuba as well, where in two voyages he introduced 115 of them, whereas the licence provided for 80: 35 were therefore introduced illegally. This gave rise to a clash with the governor of the island, which led to Bassignana's imprisonment.
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Belgrano Peri (Pérez) Domingo
1757–1780A native of Oneglia, in 1750 he emigrated to Cádiz, where he Hispanicised his surname to Pérez, and a few years later he moved to Buenos Aires, where he became one of the richest Ligurian merchants of the Río de la Plata. He traded in enslaved people imported from Brazil and started commercial operations with the Banda Oriental, France and Great Britain.
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Benzano y Dagnino Antonio
1800–1820Born in Sestri, in the Archdiocese of Genoa (AAL, Expedientes matrimoniales, 1811). In his will he declares that he owns four enslaved people.
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Berardi Giannotto
1482–1495He was a Florentine merchant who lived in Seville and ran the Seville branch of the Medici bank. Along with Marchionni and Giovanni, his brother, he obtained permission to trade enslaved people from the Canary Islands and the African coast in the kingdoms of Aragon and Castile. He also played a key role in financing exploration and conquest enterprises, including the conquest of the island of La Palma in the Canary Islands with the Genoese banker Francisco de Riberol, and Columbus's first voyage. During his second voyage, it was precisely to Berardi that Christopher Columbus sent the first known shipment of enslaved indigenous people to cross the Atlantic. In 1495, he signed an agreement with the Spanish monarchs to dispatch twelve caravels to the West Indies to supply Hispaniola. However, he did not live to see the results as he died in January 1496, before the caravels set sail. Moreover, the caravels never reached the New World as they were wrecked in the Strait of Gibraltar a few days after setting off. Following his death, the company was inherited by Amerigo Vespucci, who sold it a few years later to another Florentine entrepreneur, Donato Nicolini. Nicolini then entrusted Piero Rondinelli with the management of the Seville business.
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Bieluto Alberto
1660–1679 (decade)A Genoese merchant active in Cádiz, in the 1660s and 1670s he was a partner in the expeditions of the asiento ships to the Caribbean. The same network included Giovanni Battista Porrata, Giovanni Rolato, the brothers Giovanni Battista and Pantaleo Grasso, Pietro Del Forno and Giovanni Battista Priaruggia.
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Bonafante Camilo
c. 1591–1610A Genoese, resident first in Callao and then in Arica, he procured enslaved people for the merchant Jacom Fragoso, originally from Recco and active between Lima, Arequipa and Puno, who sold them alongside other goods.
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Bonini Stefano
c. 1591–1610A minor investor in the Spanish asiento in the 1590s. In the early seventeenth century he was residing in Cartagena.
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Infante and Duke of Parma, beneficial owner of 3 and one-third shares of the Real Compañía de La Habana, deeply involved in the Cuban slave economy, which came from the estate of Elisabeth Farnese. The dividend, 83 and one-third pesos, was collected on 30 July 1784 by the trustee Juan Bautista Rossi. The coupons document the transfer of Cuban income to the courts of the Italian peninsula.
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Princess of Asturias and wife of the future Charles IV of Spain, through the Farnese inheritance she was the beneficial owner of 3 and one-third shares of the Real Compañía de La Habana, deeply involved in the Cuban slave economy.
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Bosco Alessandro
1662Agent of Grillo and Lomellini in Amsterdam. Thanks to his mediation, on 15 September 1662 Grillo and Lomellini signed with the Dutch West India Company (WIC) a contract providing for the annual delivery of 1,200 enslaved people to Curaçao.
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Bunda Antonio
1770–1777Born in the place called Bendon, in the jurisdiction of Albenga, province of Genoa, son of Juan Bautista Bunda and Catalina Pana (AGN, Protocolo 559, 1776-1777). In his will he declared that he owned an enslaved man, José María, whom he left to the Convento Grande de San Francisco to serve the friars; if he were not considered suitable, the convent could sell him.
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Burlamacchi Benjamin
1665–1691A merchant and investor from Lucca, he settled in Amsterdam in 1665. Through his own trading house and his relations with the Genoese correspondents in Cádiz (Maffei, Ratto and Marien) and with the Tensini in Amsterdam, he financed operations connected with the slave trade of the asiento de negros and also corresponded with agents in Curaçao, such as Balthasar Beck. In 1691 he left for Bengal in the service of the VOC, the Dutch East India Company, and died there in 1697.
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Bustanzo Giuseppe
1663–1667Between 1663 and 1667 he organised the networks of the Grillo and Lomellini asiento in the Caribbean from his base in Cartagena de Indias. In the 1650s he had founded in Cádiz, with his brother Giovanni, a trading house that had already dealt with Grillo and Lomellini before the asiento was granted.
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Ca da Mosto Alvise
1455–1462A Venetian navigator in the service of Prince Henry the Navigator, in 1455 he reached the mouth of the Senegal, where he exchanged horses for enslaved people, and continued as far as the Gambia. On the expedition of 1456 he sailed with the Genoese Antoniotto Usodimare towards the Casamance, the Bijagós Islands and Cape Verde; he then remained seven years in Lagos, before returning to Venice in 1462.
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Cadena Gaspar
c. 1595–1610He purchased licences to export enslaved people from Cape Verde. From Lisbon he moved to Brazil, where he prospered by transporting enslaved Africans destined for the sugar plantations.
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Cadorna Esteban
1790–1818Between 1790 and 1818 he is documented in Lima in at least twenty-one transactions involving enslaved people, several times as buyer and as seller. In 1804 he also formed a company with two other partners, contributing 12,000 pesos to a capital of 36,000, intended for the purchase of 150 enslaved people in Buenos Aires and their resale in Lima.
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Cambini Francesco e Bernardo
1461–1469Owners of two enslaved African women, Isabell and Giovanna, who arrived in Livorni from Lisbon in 1461 and 1469 respectively through Giovanni Guidetti, agent of the Cambini bank in Lisbon.
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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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Canot Theodore
1819–1860Born in Florence to a French father (Louis Canot, an officer and paymaster in the Napoleonic army) and a Piedmontese mother, in 1819 he left Livorno as a cabin boy on an American vessel. Shipwrecked near Cuba during a voyage to Havana, he eventually reached the city, where in 1826 he embarked on the Areostatico, a slave ship bound for the Rio Pongo, in West Africa. Over the following twenty years or so he was among the principal traders in enslaved people between the African coast and Cuba, first as a commercial agent on the Rio Pongo, then at Gallinas, where he worked with the Spanish slave trader Pedro Blanco. Arrested by the French navy, he was sentenced to ten years' imprisonment in Brest; pardoned by Louis-Philippe after about a year, he returned to Africa. In 1841 he founded at Cape Mount, in Liberia, a trading settlement called New Florence, which the British navy destroyed in 1844. Having resumed the slave trade, in 1847 he was captured during an expedition and taken to New York for trial; he fled before the verdict and took refuge in Brazil. He died in Paris in 1860.
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Capanegra Agustin
1816–1827Like other Genoese, he farmed rented land. He owned a house in a quinta in the Buenos Aires area and no fewer than fourteen enslaved people.
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Caracciolo Cipriani Amelia
until 1834She appears, together with her husband Cipriano Cipriani, among the beneficiaries of the compensation granted by Great Britain to slave owners after the abolition of slavery in the British colonies, in 1834. The Cipriani family owned the Moka plantation in Trinidad, in the British West Indies, and was also linked to the Ortinola property, in the Maracas region. In the Legacies of British Slavery Database her name appears in connection with compensation Trinidad no. 1017, for which £270 12s 0d was awarded.