Narrative sources from the period tend to focus on the wealth and splendor of Renaissance culture in Renaissance cities (not always positively), but a few explorations of Italy's surprisingly rich archives paint a more complicated picture.

The majority of the population continued to be rural farmers, largely but not entirely removed from the flourishing cities. In 1427 Tuscany, Florence alone contained 14% of the region's population but controlled almost 60% of its wealth. Crop and livestock prices did tick upward, especially in the early fifteenth century, but not enormously. The benefit to farmers from the price increases might have been offset, however, by the concentration of land ownership into fewer hands, and the rise of sharecropping instead. And on the other hand, the fifteenth century witnessed many fewer famines than the fourteenth, so at least there was less starving.

In the cities, too, the period saw the concentration of monetary wealth into an ever-shrinking group of elite families. Tax reforms meant to offset this by not taxing dwelling-places (the one possession of less-moneyed city residents) had the opposite effect. The wealthy poured cash into ornamentation for their houses, converting liquid capital into dead wealth (but hey, Renaissance art). Meanwhile, indebtedness became a very big problem.

A lot of the urban poor ended up working as domestic servants. The value placed on education by the upper middle class and elite had no place for poor children, who often started working as their richer counterparts started school or in-home learning. Wages for servants did rise during the fifteenth century, but so did rich people's efforts to avoid paying them.

Christine Klapisch-Zuber's portrait of women's lives in Italy is one of the more, um, pessimistic perspectives on late medieval/Renaissance women. Nevertheless, she suggests that poorer women may have had slightly more freedom at least within their families than richer women did. For one thing, while the 15C trend towards extended families living under one roof did stretch down the socioeconomic scale somewhat, poorer families were much more likely to live in simple conjugal units. Since women legally left their families to join their new husbands', a woman living with just her husband (and eventually offspring) perhaps offered her closer access to the head of the family, so to speak. Additionally, rich widows invariably rejoined their paternal family household or entered a convent, generally having to leave their children behind with their husbands' family. There are a few examples of poor widows who instead served as the head of their household.

And, of course, if you were poor, you probably did not end up locked in a tower to eat your dead children, so you had that going for you.

Obvious sources: David Herlihy and Christine Klapisch-Zuber, Tuscans and their Families: A Study of the Florentine Castato of 1427 (1985); Herlihy, Medieval and Renaissance Pistoia (1967); Klapisch-Zuber, Women, Family and Ritual in Renaissance Italy (1987).