Rassegna storica del Risorgimento

166
Paul Martin Hoivell
Withìn sìx months of the passage of the final major legislation on the expansion of the Banca Nazionale, the proposai for the Cassa del Commercio e dell'Industria was nearing the end of its brief journey through the bureaucratic machinery in Turin. By then the kingdom's first full-scale stock market boom was under way. In addition to the Banca Nazionale's capital increase, four joint-stock railroad companies were appro-ved in the middle of 1852. Seventeen new joint-stock companies were promoted in Turin in 1853 and another sixteen were added in 1854, whHe some thirty-five joint-stock companies were floated in Genoa in 1853 and 1854.19> For ali of these ventures, and for the railroads in particular, the Cassa del Commercio and the other discount and deposit banks which eventually joined it offered the prospect of timely financial support and a wide range of services.
The Cassa del Commercio e dell'Industria was put together toward the end of 1852 by a small group of merchant bankers in Turin and Genoa. The new company quickly received the stamp of approvai from the government, embodied by Cavour, newly returned to power as President of the Council of Ministers and Minister of Finance, and from the kingdom's Council of State. At the beginning of May 1853 the bank opened its doors for business in Turin and Genoa, It was a joint-stock commercial bank which proposed to accept deposits, with or without the payment of interest, to discount commercial paper (maturing within six months), and to make short-term secured advances (of up to six months) to its commercial clientele.20 It was a type of bank which had existed in England for some twenty years but which had emerged in France only in the extraordinary circumstances of 1848. Its spread on the European continent began with the investment boom which accompanied the return of peace and stability at the beginning of the 1850s. In the decades which followed it quickly established itself as the basic type of European commercial bank, remaining essentially unchanged to this day.21)
Railroad development in the Kingdom of Sardinia. The Kingdom of Sardinia's absolutist regime was s"low to respond to the stimulus of early railroad development in Europe. The first steam-powered locomotive was unveiled in England in 1825 and by the beginning of 1826 the Turin government was receiving the first proposai for a railroad from Genoa to
19) Pautassi, pp. 349ff; and Doria, 1:156.
2) Archivio Centrale dello Stato (Roma), Series Ministero di Agricoltura, Industria e Commercio - Industrie, Banche, Società (1839-1883) (hereafter MAIC), b(usta) 155, f (ascicelo) 107, s(otto)F. 1, Luigi Boi micia and associates to Ministry of Finance, 23 Nov. 1852; Cassa del Commercio e dell'Industria (hereafter CCI) act of formation, 18 Dee. 1852; ministerial report to Council of State, Dee. 1852; Council of State opinion of 18 Jan. 1853; two undated lettera from the founders to Ministry of Finance and related undated memo by Cavour; ministerial report to the Crown; decree of 23 Jan. 1853; Ministry of Finance to Bolmida, 23 Jan. 1853.
21) See the works cited in note 11 above.