Early modern Rome hosted a community of Jews and conversos who populated the streets of this unpolished, ruined city, which by the turn of the sixteenth century was also the nest of unique humanistic and literary enterprises. After their expulsion from Castile and Aragon in 1492, Jewish and converso families found in Rome a city that offered them a rich spatial, social and religious stratification: they could live as Jews in the ghetto, as Spaniards in Pozzo Bianco or as Christian prelates at the curia. Here they could continue their career or start a new one with relative ease, since the Spanish Inquisition rarely interfered with affairs in Rome, and the Roman Inquisition was not established until 1542. This chapter explores the rich corpus of texts produced in Rome depicting the abilities or trickeries that helped those individuals navigate the city. Literary works and translations reveal how the migration of exiled Spanish Jews and conversos to Rome entailed not only the relocation of people and the adaptation of their daily practices, but also the displacement of the concept ‘converse’ in the Roman environment. The pressure of the new circumstances shifted this concept, and ultimately that of foreigner, in myriad ways that challenge the idea of a naturalized social identity and destabilize its historical interpretation.

The Spanish Presence in Rome

During the late fifteenth century, Rome was home to a vast population of Spanish diplomats, prelates and humanists who wrote or published their writings in the city.