This project explores how Italians during the long seventeenth century explored, understood, appropriated, and intervened in the larger world. It focuses particularly on the activities of the Roman patrician Pietro della Valle (1586–1652). Della Valle was famed for his travels to Turkey, Persia, and India, which he wrote about at length in his celebrated travel letters. As a scholar and academician he was a central cultural figure in Rome at the height of the Baroque papacy. He offers a compelling glimpse into the Catholic Reformation in Italy, as well as how Italians—who operated on the margins of the imperial powers—sought to understand the larger world in the absence of the colonial projects so typical among other Europeans of the day.