The essays collected here evaluate the broad range of contexts in which Spaniards were present in early modern Italy. They consider diplomacy, sanctity, art, politics and even popular verse. Each essay excavates how Italians who came into contact with the Spanish crown’s power perceived and interacted with the wider range of identities brought amongst them by its servants and subjects. Together they demonstrate what influenced and what determined Italians’ responses to Spain; they show Spanish Italy in its full transcultural glory and how its inhabitants projected its culture—throughout the sixteenth century and beyond.

Piers Baker-Bates holds a PhD from the University of Cambridge and is a research associate in Art History at the Open University, UK. He is the author of Sebastiano del Piombo and the World of Spanish Rome (2016) and “Un nuovo modo di colorire in pietra”: Paintings on Stone and Material Innovation (with E. Calvillo, 2018).

Miles Pattenden, lecturer in Early Modern History at Oxford University, is a historian of the Catholic Church and of the political history of Italy and Spain from the fifteenth to the nineteenth century. He is the author of Electing the Pope in Early Modern Italy, 1450–1700 and is particularly interested in the relationship between Church and state in Catholic societies.