Chapter La Piazza universale di Tomaso Garzoni: una svolta nella letteratura del lavoro

Abstract

Tomaso Garzoni’s Piazza universale di tutte le professioni del mondo (1585) describes about five hundred kinds of jobs, both intellectual and manual. Garzoni tells the story of each one of them, its origins, its tools, its performers. It is an astounding display of the variety of human activities, from kings to executioners, comes with endless lists of the tools used by each profession and a host of historic and erudite data. All works, be high or humble, are indispensable in society: there are no good or bad jobs but only good and bad workers. The Piazza represents a turning point in the history of the work: it collects what was known about it while giving to it a literary dignity; moreover its “technical” description prepares the terrain for the scientific understanding of the work.