Polifonia di storie evocate da un’annotazione della morte di Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio

The “polyphony” that characterizes archives generally lies in their ability to tell an endless number of stories to those who are able to listen to them, providing a surprising amount of content to reconstruct new narratives and create keys for understanding the past and interpreting the future. In this sense, the well-known document with the note on the death of Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio (Milan 1571-Porto Ercole 1610) and the ensign Gaspar Montero, found within the archive of the Parish of S. Erasmo and S. Paolo della Croce in Porto Ercole and now called foglietto by scholars (the little sheet), has served as a pretext for narrating the territory of the ancient Diocese of Sovana, starting from a remote place: Porto Ercole, therefore allowing the reconstruction of the context in the complexity that seems to transpire from that document and thus aggregating the different information found mostly among archival sources.