Circulations culturelles et diasporas religieuses. Rome à l’époque moderne, un scénario multiethnique et multireligieux inattendu

The House of the Catechumens in Rome (1543) represents a microcosm or a “contact zone” in which Jews and Muslims desirous of being baptized came from Italy, Europe, Levant and the Ottoman Empire throughout the early modern period. Therefore it provides an important perspective in order to examine economic, cultural, physical and symbolic transfers and exchanges. Often, however, the actors in this multi-ethnic and multi-religious scenario were very ambiguous: thus they pose more general and broader problems to historians. The article aims to analyze the presence of Muslims, slaves or not, in Rome, up to now unnoticed but important to understand their strategies of insertion in the city. The most relevant issue that emerges, from a wider historical point of view, is the papal policy towards religious minorities and the role of Rome as a space for communication, connection and exchange, in which the solution for the problem of religious otherness seems totally opposite to the Spanish policy of expulsion