By Brendan DooleyBaccio Giovannini, the Florentine resident in Paris, writing on 10 June 1602, goes straight into detail:“My Most Serene Lord and Patron: After my last letter on the fourth, since so many purges and ointments and poultices did nothing…
Author: wp_11035540
By Brendan Dooley The date is Turin, 20 July 1589. To an unsuspecting reader the letter would seem to be referring to everyday private domestic matters: wife, children, rental incomes, a nephew, the local priest, a doctor, etc. The writer,…
By Andrea di Carlo and Brendan Dooley It was a busy week in Venice. According to the newsletter of 7 March 1592, celebrations were being held here in honor of the newly elected pope; meanwhile, a Veronese person was being…
By Brendan Dooley Mediceo del Principato, vol. 2861. Unpaginated, but bound tightly enough so as not to confuse the order of pages. Leafing through, we find the order of pages seems somewhat idiosyncratic. Why is “From Bruxelles the 20th…
By Brendan DooleyTrouble in Rome! The Rome newsletter of 23 October 1582 informs:“The Congregation responsible for the reform and intercalation of the year has heard from Naples about a serious error in the printed version, such that the pope having…
by Davide Limatola The appearance of handwritten news sheets known as avvisi in Italian, circulating through the chanceries and streets of European cities, even before the invention of printed newspapers, raises several important questions. One of these is what were…
Less than three months before the battle of Lepanto, famously won by the Holy League against the Turks on October 7, 1571 in the Gulf of Patras, passions in the Mediterranean are already running high. Bit by bit, the Venetian…
In the words of the Florentine resident, Amerigo Salvetti: “It is confirmed that on the 6th of this month this new tribunal of Westminster pronounced the death sentence against their king, and on the 9th had this carried out by…
Argentoratum, Argentina, Argentum, Argentaria, Argentoria, Strateburgis, Stradburgo (Strasburgensis, Straceburgensis), Straßburg (Elsaß, Alsace).Our handwritten newsletter from Argentina, (Archivio di Stato, Florence, MdP 4170, img 6531) is not from South America.But let’s take a closer look. We learn,“The five companies of Zurich…
The Irish were making trouble again, or so it seemed. The year was 1666, and relations between the Irish and the English, only recently becalmed following the close of the tumultuous Cromwellian period, were being roiled by a new crisis,…