I Gondi di Lione. Una banca d’affari fiorentina nella Francia del primo Cinquecento

The volume analyses the history of a merchant-bank and of a Florentine family transplanted in Lyon at the beginning of XVI century. The three surviving ledgers of Gondi company are investigated in order to describe the role of the Florentine mercantile, banking and financial entrepreneurship in a basic center of the European economy of the Renaissance. Indonesian spices and Italian silk clothes, currency speculations and loans to the kings, stimulate a powerful élite of businessmen, moved by a feeling of grandeur and by an ambitious cultural and artistic patronage.