A distinguished Italian medievalist recently congratulated me on an academic promotion that resulted in my leaving the Scuola Normale of Pisa. He said, partly in jest, that I could now escape the nefarious influence of that den of free thinkers. Perhaps he was remembering different times. Since events in Italy and the world in general signal the end of the secular model of the modem state, he asserted, we should all seek our security in the absolute truth offered by the church, whose history is not measured by the petty course of a few short centuries. When I objected that the atrocities committed every day in the name of religious belief are plain for all to see, he reminded me that the history of the formation of the state was also marked by tragedy. I prefer to keep my original opinion. And I relate this episode to remind our foreign guests and friends about the passion with which even the best Italian historians studied church-state relations until thirty years ago. Not too long ago another Italian historian, animated by ideas diametrically opposed to the ones I mentioned above, devoted an entire chapter of one of his books to a meticulous inventory of daily processions in Baroque Rome. His conclusion: there were too many. American historian Denys Hay's harsh indictment, in a pioneering synthesis of fifteenth-century Italian ecclesiastical history, cannot be easily dismissed. Confessional culture, he noted, largely monopolized the history of the church as an institution; secular historians instead looked exclusively at the intellectual history that has challenged that institution.' One objection to this view is that there are many exceptions-for example, Federico Chabod's important and excellent essay on religious life in the state of Milan, which also counts as a masterpiece of church institutional history. Another objection is that little else could be expected from historiography in Machiavelli's country during the first hundred years after the unification of Italy and the end of the papacy's temporal power. More important, the