4 Gypsies in counter-reformation Rome Giorgio Caravale Historical studies on gypsies in early modern Europe carried out in the past few decades have followed either an approach based on ethnic identity or a socio-economic strategy. Infuenced by sociological studies, the former focussed on gypsies’ supposed common identity and ethnic origin, claiming that they must be seen as a people with Indian roots who managed to keep their ethnicity intact when they left their country of origin. 1 The latter approach concentrated more on the social position of gypsies than on their economic status, comparing them to the groups of poor marginalized criminals that populated the cities and countryside in the Old Regime, and reconstructing their story in tandem with these social outcasts. 2 Miriam Eliav-Feldon has outlined both approaches and discussed which had the greater infuence on the prevailing attitude towards gypsies. 3 She stresses that the early modern period was characterized by an obses- sion with purity and contagion that took shape in the idea that men and women born into certain groups could contaminate the social fabric of their places of residence regardless of their faith or culture. 4 This attitude fuelled the Spanish ideology of limpieza de sangre (purity of blood) in the ffteenth and sixteenth centuries, and the action taken by the Spanish Inquisition against converted Jews also extended to gypsies. The idea that some ethnic groups were recognizable in the light of certain characteristics deemed “inseparable from their existence” was applied to gypsies, who were often identi fed as “thieves by nature.” On the basis of analysis of literary texts of the time, the author even equates the burgeoning “racist” attitude towards gypsies displayed by some authors to certain traits of anti-Semitism in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. 5 However, this daring juxtaposition is then played down by the observation that neither inquisitorial authorities nor Protestant consistories were ever interested in gypsies. 6 Unlike Jews and Moors, gypsies were not af fliated with a religion that they had been forced to abandon and which they could return to. Instead, they showed read- iness to adapt to the religious customs of the countries that welcomed them. Gypsies were depicted as groups with a high degree of religious fexibility in all contemporary descriptions, ready to shape their beliefs and rituals around those in their place of residence. In this way, they became Christians in Christian states, Muslims in Muslim countries, and so on. 7 Therefore, after initially adopt- ing the ethnic identity interpretation, Eliav-Feldon seems inclined to support