Museo Mercantile

Behind the arcades where Bolzano's merchants once met, the Mercantile Museum keeps the furnished rooms of a tribunal created to judge fair-trade disputes. Portraits, documents, decorative arts and three medieval cellars trace how a planned market settlement grew into Tyrol's leading trading hub.

Why it matters

Bolzano owes its old centre to trade. Founded as a planned market town around the end of the twelfth century, it drew merchants to periodic fairs from the thirteenth century onwards, and by the early modern period it had become a hub of trans-Alpine trade whose fairs drew buyers from north and south of the mountains. The Mercantile Museum, run by the local Chamber of Commerce, is the institutional memory of that story. It occupies the Palazzo Mercantile, the early eighteenth-century building between Via dei Portici and Via Argentieri that housed the Mercantile Magistrate, a special commercial tribunal set up in 1635 at the initiative of Archduchess Claudia de' Medici to settle disputes among traders during the fair seasons. Few European cities preserve the working rooms of a merchant court together with its records; here the tribunal's furnishings, its paintings and part of a great trading family's archive survive in the place where they were used.

What to notice

Erected in the early eighteenth century to designs attributed to Veronese architect Francesco Perotti, the palace pairs a plain commercial ground floor with an ornate upper storey. The original rooms include meeting chambers, the chancellor's room and the Hall of Honour, formerly the tribunal's courtroom. Period furniture, paintings and decorative-art objects belonged to the institution. Part of the commercial archive of the G. A. Menz firm, a leading Bolzano family business of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, preserves correspondence, ledgers and documents. Three restored medieval vaults date to the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, when the city's fairs were held above.

Context and history

The Mercantile Magistrate was created in 1635, when Bolzano's fairs had outgrown the ordinary courts: merchants needed judgments fast, in their own language and according to commercial custom, so the archduchess granted the city a dedicated tribunal with its own jurisdiction. The Magistrate moved into the Palazzo Mercantile once construction was complete and occupied it until the mid-nineteenth century. When the institution was wound up, its assets and functions passed to the newly founded Chamber of Commerce, which took over the palace, maintained it and later moved to modern offices. Rather than leave the old rooms empty, the Chamber restored them and opened the building to the public as a museum in the late twentieth century — an unusual institution in the Alpine region, a museum devoted to economic history. The museum's records, furnishings and archive largely remain associated with the institution and its historic premises.