This book brings to completion a project twenty years in the making carried out by archivists working on the archival fonds of charitable organizations in Milan. It does not consider all pia loca in Milan, but focuses, instead, on the forty organizations that were amalgamated in 1784 as part of Emperor Joseph II's reforms and that, in 2003, became the Azienda di Servizi alla Persona Golgi-Redaelli (Golgi Redaelli Agency for Personal Assistance). The volume is actually a guide to the archive of the Agency. It opens with a short history of the organization and its connections with Milanese history and society. Some of the pious organizations founded "to contain poverty by providing subsidies meant to prevent a family's slide into marginality and delinquency" (p. 27) have a long and ancient history, as is the case for the Scuola delle Quattro Marie, attested in documents since 1305.These pious associations were governed by a small group of administrators who were part of the city's ruling elite. "The relationship between the pious associations and religious authorities was complex" (p. 30); many charitable organizations had to submit, at least partially, to the control of the Church, especially after the Council of Trent. In general, however, most remained basically autonomous up to the time of Empress Maria Theresa and her co-regent son Joseph II when, "in the context of a project of universal reorganization of resources and administrative structures within the Habsburg Empire, the State entered firmly into the social assistance sector" (p. 31). In 1937 these pious associations were refashioned into E.C.A.s (Enti Comunali Assistenza, that is, Municipal Assistance Entities). In time, they moved more and more towards elder care and incorporated other institutions, such as the Istituto Geriatrico Camillo Golgi (in Abbiategrasso) and the Istituto Geriatrico Piero Redaelli (in Milan and Vimodrone).The history of the Azienda and its earlier incarnations is reconstructed from archival information gleaned, in particular, from the five major fonds that survived the 1784 suppression, that is, from the archives of the Quattro Marie, of the Misericordia, of the Divinità, of the Carità in Porta Nuova, and of the Nostra Signora di Loreto.The Quattro Marie is documented from ca. 1305 to 1801. Its fond includes documents from various other charitable institutions that were incorporated into the Quattro Marie, that is:
