FOR many historians, Italy in the Baroque period presents a rather sorry sight. During the Renaissance, the peninsula had been a major political, economic, and cultural force : by the mid seventeenth century, Venice, Florence, and Rome were seen more as just essential stops on the tourist trail of the “grand tour.” It is generally assumed that the broad factors affecting the “decline” of Italy in the early seventeenth century included the shift of trade from the Mediterranean with the opening up of new routes to the Orient and the New World, a series of economic crises (particularly in 1619–22) and plagues (about a third of the population of Venice died in 1630–31), and the dulling effects of generally reactionary systems of government (for the most part, hereditary duchies). Italy was still an acknowledged haven for the arts and sciences, at least when they could avoid the heavy arm of the Church censors. But there was—and is—a distinct feeling that world events were now being played on a different stage.

Of course, this could have its advantages. The city-states of Italy had long been pawns of the three European “superpowers” of Spain, France, and the Empire— England was only on the distant horizon—but a new political realism now lessened the threat of foreign domination. So, too, did the cohesive force of the Catholic Counter-Reformation. Spain certainly reacted sharply to Florence's apparent attempts to woo the French with the marriage of Henri iv, king of France, to Maria de’ Medici in October 1600, building a fortress on the island of Elba just off the Tuscan coast. But Grand Duke Ferdinando de’ Medici took the message, and in 1608 he wedded his eldest son and heir, Cosimo, to Maria Magdalena, Archduchess of Austria and sister of the Queen of Spain. The War of Mantuan Succession between the French and the Habsburgs on the death of Vincenzo ii Gonzaga in 1627 had much less happy results, with the horrific sack of the city of Mantua by Imperial troops in July 1630. These troops also brought the plague to Italy (and the entourage of the Mantuan court counsellor and librettist of Monteverdi's Orfeo, Alessandro Striggio, carried it to Venice as he pleaded for assistance from the doge).