Between Believing and Not Believing. Fluidity of Paths in Early Modern Italy: A Venetian Glimpse

This article, focusing on the Venetian context, aims to provide an overview of atheism, particularly of a ‘popular’ nature, with a special emphasis on the seventeenth century. By analyzing a few cases and the evolution of historiographical developments on early modern Italy, it seeks to demonstrate that unbelieving and openly atheistic points of view were indeed present in popular, non-academic circles, and that the dynamics of contamination between levels of culture were constant and not always linked to topdown acculturation processes.