This chapter considers Renaissance Italy and its culture from the perspective of its relations with the European and extra-European world. From an initial focus on religious and ethnic diversity within Italy with discussion of Greek, Jewish, and Ethiopian diaspora cultures, the chapter moves to consider the diffusion of the cultural innovations of the Italian Renaissance beyond the Alps. This is examined first within Europe in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, and then within Europe’s colonial and missionary ‘contact zones’ in the Americas, Africa, and Asia. The next section of the chapter focuses on a particularly rich intersection between Renaissance culture and extra-European transcultural exchange in the form of the work of Italian Jesuit missionaries in China, India, and Japan. A final section explores similarities between missionary practices of ‘accommodation’ and cultural outreach and those adopted by secular figures such as the Florentine merchant Filippo Sassetti and the traveller, diplomat, and early scholar of Persian Giovanni Battista Vecchietti.