Abstract

The documentation available at the State Archives of Milan makes it possible to reconstruct, with sufficient approximation, the salary trend lines, in terms of «recognition» of the value attributed to individual professorships in the different subject areas present in the «Almum Studium Papiense» and the Palatine Schools. A cursory sifting, however of the 18th century rolls already makes it possible to outline a sort of «stock market» of the highest-paid professorships. Echoes of the medieval arts dispute still seem to be present: legal professorships, at least in the pre-Reformation period, are more rewarded (the gap is truly macroscopic in the first decades of the 18th century) compared to those of «medical» cut, and appreciable rewards also emerge for some of the humanities. There is a policy of «augmentation» of salaries on account of – it would seem – the good service rendered by individual lecturers. However, the salaries shown in the rolls do not take a snapshot of the full compensation of professors because immunities, to varying degrees granted to individuals, and extra-salary income must be considered. The total sums allocated to the Lombard university system, including the Ambrosian «Scuole Palatine» and the University of Pavia, remained on the whole stable at around l. 44,000 for a long time, until the Teresian reforms, which saw a budget more than doubled, including also the overall overhaul, at the level of research facilities such as laboratories and libraries, as well as the methodological framework of studies, and a focus on the merits of individual professors, measurable through the so-called «augmentations» of their salaries.