“They couldn’t give me water, I was the son of the boss!” he said. Today, after getting a degree in viticulture at the University of California, Davis, he chairs a company, Marchesi Frescobaldi Group, that produces 11 million bottles a year, one of the biggest in Italy. He even named his dog Brunello, after the Brunello di Montalcino the company makes.
Before entering winemaking in 1308, the Frescobaldis were wool traders and bankers, financing King Edward I’s wars in Wales and France. The family -- which also built Florence’s first-ever bridge, Santa Trinita -- also includes Girolamo Frescobaldi, one of the main composers of keyboard music in the late Renaissance and early Baroque periods, as well as poet Dino Frescobaldi. The latter collected and conserved the first seven Canti of the Divine Comedy for Dante Alighieri when he was sent to exile, allowing him to complete the work.
The Frescobaldis’ long lineage is hardly unique in Florence, Tuscany’s capital. Bank of Italy researchers Guglielmo Barone and Sauro Mocetti compared tax records of Florentine taxpayers in 1427 and 2011 to track inter-generational mobility, and found that there was meaningful persistence of socioeconomic status across the centuries.
“The huge political, demographic and economic upheavals that have occurred in the city across the centuries were not able to untie the Gordian knot of socioeconomic inheritance,” the authors wrote.
Germany may be prone to even more concentrations of inherited wealth, research shows.
“In hardly any other country does social origin influence one’s income as much as in Germany,” wrote Marcel Fratzscher, head of the Berlin-based German Institute for Economic Research, in a recent book. “The richest citizens are also those with the highest income. For to everyone who has, more shall be given.”
Germany’s high share of family wealth is in part a consequence of a tax system that until this year allowed family-owned businesses -- including a large proportion of the medium-sized companies that are the backbone of its economy -- to pass on their financial assets while paying almost no estate tax.
Count Alexander Fugger-Babenhausen, a descendant of arguably Europe’s richest man in the 16th century, says maintaining the fortune’s integrity is a responsibility. The 34-year old returned to Germany to manage the family’s wealth and charitable activities after working in investment banking and private equity in London.
“It’s not the fast-lived, dynamic sector that forces you to take high risks,” he said at the Fuggerei, the affordable-housing complex founded by Jakob Fugger in 1521. “In every decision we make for the Fuggerei, we try to consider that and be prudent. It would be disastrous if a mistake brought sustainability to an end after 19 generations.”
Jakob Fugger ordered the construction of the Fuggerei to give back to his city, and try to save his soul in the meantime. Those living in the complex of cozy, two-story terrace houses pay a yearly rent of 0.88 euros, as per Fugger's decree that the cost be one Rhenish florin, and must make three daily prayers for the founder’s soul and family.