«Desiderusi de andare ad exercitare tale arte fuora». La fuga dei lavoratori nelle città dell’Italia centro-settentrionale (secoli XIV-XV)

This article aims to examine the relocations carried out by artisans between the 14th and 15th centuries. These relocations became constant objects of judicial sentences produced by governments and by guilds, which were both interested in protecting their technological improvements. There was cities that lost numerous skilled labor, with a strong and fierce opposition to labor mobility, and other cities that sought to attract and divert these flows into their urban spaces. Public institutions in several places actively mobilize in the search for specialized craftsmen who allowed the flowering or the implantation ex novo of new industries. These movements of workers were actually irregular and, sometimes, they even ended in the return into the native city.