My research explores how, between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries, Europeans built their knowledge of the Islamic world and of the other traditions they called "oriental." Rather than an abstract repertoire of ideas, I am interested in knowledge as a material and relational practice — shaped by texts in motion, by people who translate, and by archives that take form within often asymmetrical relations of power.
- Early modern Catholic Orientalism and trans-imperial scholarly networks. I work on the circulation of manuscripts, books, and people across Rome, Venice, Vienna, Constantinople, Paris, and the extra-European worlds — from Mughal India and the Malabar coast to Safavid Persia and the Ottoman Empire. My focus lies on the figures of mediation — librarians, dragomans, missionaries, diplomats, prisoners — and on the infrastructures that made such exchanges possible. My recent publications on these questions include Saperi viventi. Libri, relazioni e natura nel primo orientalismo cattolico (available in open access [http://www.fedoabooks.unina.it/index.php/fedoapress/catalog/view/706/792/3581] ) and, with Paola Molino, Thomas Wallnig, and Hülya Çelik, The Oriental Outpost of the Republic of Letters. Sebastian Tengnagel, the Imperial Library in Vienna, and Knowledge of the Orient in Early Modern Europe (Brill, 2025), together with the Tengnagel Correspondence Data [https://tengnagel.univie.ac.at/] database, developed with Thomas Wallnig on the University of Vienna's Phaidra platform.
- Paolo Sarpi, Fulgenzio Micanzio, Venice, and the Anglophone world. Sarpi has been at the heart of my work for many years, beginning with my doctoral dissertation on his reception and his ties with Jacobean England. I am currently preparing a monograph and editing two epistolary corpora: his correspondence with Dudley Carleton and his correspondence with Giovan Francesco Biondi.
- Religious conversions and confessional frontiers. Conversions as a vantage point on the porousness of religious worlds and on the individual strategies of adaptation, resistance, and dissimulation they reveal. With Vincenzo Lavenia and Sabina Pavone, I co-edited the volume Sacre metamorfosi. Racconti di conversione tra Roma e il mondo in età moderna (Viella, 2022); together we have also curated a database of early modern conversion narratives.
- Books as spoils of war. Oriental manuscripts taken during the long Turkish wars, in Mediterranean naval engagements, and in city sacks: books that entered European libraries as plunder and reshaped European knowledge of Islam. This is the thread that opens Saperi viventi — the Qur'an that Paolo Sarpi sent from Venice to Isaac Casaubon in 1604 — and the subject of an article of mine in Erudition and the Republic of Letters.
- Captive teachers and the asymmetrical making of knowledge. Prisoners, enslaved people, converts, and dragomans as essential co-makers of the Republic of Letters, even as they worked at its margins: copyists of Qur'ans in Maltese prison cells, captured Ottoman poets teaching in imperial libraries, former slaves turned masters in Rome's polyglot printing houses.
- Natural knowledge, missions, and empire. Animals and plants as ground for encounter and conflict between Europeans, Indians, Persians, and Ottomans: hospitals for animals in India, missionary botany suspended between empirical observation and biblical allegory, and the contested making of works such as the Hortus Malabaricus at the intersection of Catholic missions (the discalced Carmelite Matteo di San Giuseppe) and Dutch colonial enterprise.
- Pietro Della Valle and his worlds. For many years I have been working on the Roman traveller Pietro Della Valle (1586–1652): on his orientalism, his collecting, and his ties with Propaganda Fide. I am currently preparing editions of several unpublished manuscript sources linked to his collaboration with the Congregation of Propaganda Fide and, together with the archivist Gianni Venditti, editions of the inventories of his library and of the chests that accompanied his long journey through the East.
Much of this work also unfolds on the terrain of the digital humanities, not as a theoretical framework, but as a concrete commitment to building databases, digital editions, and open infrastructures that make sources searchable and reusable for others.
