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Abstract: During the eighteenth century, especially during the papacies of Clement XII, benedict XIV and Pius VI, there appeared to be an increase of economic vitality, noticeable in the rapid rise of men of obscure backgrounds. In some cases the accumulated wealth was dissipated by the heirs'foolishness, in others it proved to be vulnerable to the repercussions of political change. The latter was the case of Antonio Gnudi, the stages of whose decline we will discuss here, a decline that may be attributed largely to his inability to understand the onset of a new social order, citizen and middle-class, and the end of arostocratic supremacy. In contrast to the aristocrats themselves, most of whom quickly adapted to the new regime's ideology, Antonio Gnudi seems to have been a victims of his own fidelity to the papacy and that aristocratic identity, controversial and derided, that Pius VI had conferred upon him.