Una famiglia romana e il Portogallo nel Seicento: note e documenti dall’Archivio Orsini

The article analyzes documents of the Archivio Orsini keept in the Archivio Capitolino in Rome especially related with Portugal. Particular attention is focused on Cardinal Virginio Orsini, the protector of Portugal from 1652 to his death (1676). He became a decisive element for receiving, processing and transmitting news, objects, plants and exotic animals and built a reference point for action and a culture that was not only diplomatic in his Roman space. What relationship was there between the Cardinal protector and the Portuguese community in Rome, institutions (i.e. the church 'national' of S. Antonio), but also with the agents and ambassadors of the Portuguese sovereigns? Who were his Lusitanian interlocutors? What were the advantages - personal, familal - that stemmed from this protection? The cardinal had a very difficult task: to make the Portuguese court understand the "style of the Roman court," its ceremonies, the languages of the court and the politics that seemed unrelated to a monarchy which was newly independent and which defended its rights of Padroado and which was now more interested in looking at its colonial empire that relations with the Roman court.