.

Nevertheless, my employment with several popes has forced me to desire their greatness for my own advantage.

But for this consideration I should have loved Luther like myself, not to free myself from the silly laws of Christianity as commonly understood, but to put this gang of criminals under restraint, so that they might live either without vices or without power.
From this precious text we learn much of the inner history of contemporary Italy.

As far as the Italian mind was liberated in religion it was atheistic, as far as it was reforming it went no further than rejection of the hierarchy.

The enemies to be dreaded by Rome were, as the poet Luigi Alamanni wrote, [Sidenote: Alamanni, 1495-1556] not Luther and Germany, but her own sloth, drunkenness, avarice, ambition, sensuality and gluttony.
The great spiritual factor that defeated Protestantism in Italy was not Catholicism but the Renaissance.