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.

“Each essay imparts something of value to our increasing understanding of the reciprocal influences exerted by Spain and Italy in the period, and the diverse cases adduced serve as a salutary reminder of the irreducibility of the early modern Italo-Hispanic cultural experience”, Jonathan David Bradbury, Bulletin of Spanish Studies

“The inclusion of material culture studies alongside inquiries of primary sources offers a fresh approach to this scholarly conversation”, Ana Grinberg, Sixteenth Century Journal

“The uniform standard and overall coherence of the volume make it an important contribution to the growing revival of scholarly interest in the Spanish presence in Italy and in the Mediterranean as a unifying rather than dividing space during the early modern period”, Nicholas Scott Baker, Parergon

“[The book] provides a series of thoughtful interventions into the rich history of Iberian-Italian relations in the early modern period”, Jennifer Selwyn, Journal of Jesuit Studies

“This collection of essays clearly emphasises, despite the common interests shared by Italians and Spaniards the relationship between the two peoples could vary on a wide spectrum that went from deep identification to outright rebellion”, Gabriel Guarino, The Journal of Ecclesiastical History