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The essay analyzes the financial history of one of the most important orphanages of Renaissance Italy: the Spedale degli Innocenti in Florence. Thanks to the survival of all the ledgers of the XVth and XVIth centuries, it is possible to reconstruct the costs of assistance to abandoned children. On the other hand, we can outline the forms of financing provided by private individuals, by the state offices and by the Guild of Por Santa Maria. An apparently arid sequence of financial statements, inventories, bank deposits and current accounts reveals an entire universe made up of administrators, treasurers and accountants who gravitated around what we can define as welfare before welfare in a society of the ancien regime. Not to mention the political implications, given the importance that the Spedale degli Innocenti had in late republican and ducal Florence.
