L'Archivio Visconti di Modrone

The Visconti di Modrone family comes from an important dynastic lineage of Milan. On the basis of the family archive, the essay deals how its members faced some typical events of aristocratic demography and status, during the late XVII and XVIII century. Which was, for example, the risk of family extinction, the expansive policy of primogeniture, the search of alternative placement for the other sons, the internal divisions between the relatives about the heritages, the need of a continuative presence in the public life at high levels. On the one hand, the work emphasizes the increasing number of female marriages during the Eighteenth century, and the separation of the family in two branches, with different possibilities of the cadet line compared with the firstborn ones. On the other hand, it underlines some cautions adopted to prevent that patrimony would fragment, such as successful wedding alliances, landed investments and agricultural management, various constraints in inheritance rules, which are the 'fedecommesso' or a real indivision of the same partible patrimony between the heirs over the years. Thanks to large efforts, the noble family grew larger and conserved and increased its estate, mostly consisting of real properties carefully distributed in high and low agrarian districts of Lombardy.