Pipe antiche.

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A shrewd and unscrupulous tobacco businessman, who, due to his resourcefulness and manoeuvres bordering on legality, was little appreciated by the Venetian nobility.
The figure of Manfrin is not only linked to the business world but also to his cultural image, which led him, at the end of the 18th century, to be one of the few to invest in the fine arts.

Girolamo Manfrin was born in Zadar in 1742 into a humble family whose origins are unknown, but he appeared in official documents from the late 1760s onwards.Considering the reputation that preceded him, Count Manfrin must have been a shrewd merchant and an unscrupulous entrepreneur, of dubious honesty and capable of coming to power by illicit means. Some disparaging aristocrats, in a venomous satire, said of him: 'in the middle of the mud, and from shit born'.In 1769, he managed to win the tender for the tobacco monopoly of the Serenissima Republic, obtaining the exclusive exploitation of plan

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