What would a small-scale merchant in Renaissance Italy consider a necessity at home?

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First off, "small scale merchant" basically were the (land owning) farmers around then. They'd sell their excess production to merchant intermediaries, either on their farms or villages, or in trade fairs or more permanent trading centers.

The layer above that involved merchants moving goods around within their regional trade network (e.g. from the UK midlands to London and then to Calais and onto Bruges or Antwerp or Champagne). Presumably you meant those merchants.

What you seem to be referring to as rich merchants were those who moved goods from one region to another. Their more regional peers could make a good living too, as evidenced by e.g. the Cely archive from a century before Queen Elizabeth I.

Anyway, with that aside in mind, p.25 of The Renaissance by Tim McNeese will, I think, answer your question:

Extract from The Renaissance

If you'd like a more in-depth feel of what commerce was like in the early Renaissance, the last two episodes of Tides of History happen to be on the topic:

The main difference with Elizabethan England was that there was more long distance transit by then -- and piracy, since the UK was basically into that in those days.

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