Puri family, trader in Florence
composed by Lothar Teikemeier, last updated 06.12.2012,

Puri and other merciai

It is not easy for me to define exactly what a "merciaio" is, and what a merciaio was. The word directly comes from "merce", and merce has an English equivalent in goods, wares, so that the shop may be intended at once as a shop where any goods can be sold and acquired; merchant (or "mercante" here) has exactly the same etymology, but is used for bigger trades.
In the course of time we have assisted to a kind of specialisation, so that a shop of this type still exists nowadays, and is owned by a merciaio, or more often a merciaia, his female counterpart. The major part of the goods on sale is addressed to those few women that still keep the old habit, and competence, to sew something by themselves: here they can find everything they may need, from clothes to ribbons and bands, from buttons to a few metal objects as pins and needles, and so on. Many other metal tools were once available at a merciaio, from nails, shears and knives, up to various professional tools, which now are commonly on sale in an ironware shop.
Both in the UK and the USA I have only spent a few days, and am not familiar enough with the local tradition of similar shops, and corresponding names. I am not sure that the sole word that I find for merciaio in my Zanichelli dictionary, haberdashery, is enough to convey the idea of the particular "shop" we are dealing with here. On the other hand, the English word mercer, which has the same origin and probably corresponds – or corresponded - better, is not even present in my Penguin English Student’s Dictionary.
What I have tried to justify above is that in the store that we intend to visit now more goods are likely to be found than we are ready to expect, and in particular it will be possible to find there packs of playing cards too.
Maybe some information on the family of the owners, Puri, could be useful; this family however is not among the best known in Florence, and I could find no particular information on them. I must however frankly admit that I have only verified that this family was not present among those recorded in Catasto 1427. Further research I did not perform, and thus it is not surprising at all that I did not yet find anything about them - especially considering that I am finding little or nothing even when I do search.
On the cover of the book that will be used below we find a sentence that is noted also in the catalogue of the archive(4) clearly indicating that the owner left Florence and moved to Milan. "A dì 12 novembre 1451 si partì Maso da Firenze et andò al nome di Dio a Melano." After all, let us neglect the information on the family and focus only on the account books that they have left in AOI; who they were is not so much interesting for us, just something that they were trading.
Another point that might be useful to discuss concerns the purchasers. As far as I have understood it, most of the trade, or at least most of the trade of our interest, was from merciaio to merciaio. I have not been able to locate the destination of all the goods sold: in most cases, only the name of the purchaser is indicated, often together with the indication that he is a merciaio.
In a few cases, I have not been able to read the place where the purchasers were active, even if is indicated. However, I am certain that a remarkable part of the playing cards that we will encounter below were sold to purchasers who did not live in Florence. Two of them were certainly from Pisa, one from Pistoia: these three purchasers together may account for a significant part of the trade of our specific interest, say about one third. For instance, the big sale of no less than 160 packs of different qualities recorded on 8 November 1447 was to Nicholo merciaio in Pisa. Another purchaser was active in Dicomano, and another in San Casciano, small country towns not far from Florence, and this is a clear proof that using these cards at the time was current in the countryside too.
One thus obtains the impression that, at least for certain goods, our store acted as a wholesale seller, whereas the colleagues purchasers as sellers by retail. In any case, it is evident that any merciaio coming from a smaller town to make a fresh supply of specific goods in Florence was carrying out a reasonable kind of trade.
I am not sure at all that one can also deduce from the above that playing cards were only produced in Florence at the time; it is of course easy to imagine that here one could find a wider choice of items and prices.