religious life 419
the Republic in the 16th and 17th centuries. it is characterized by an antag-
onism of a religious nature between Venice and the city of the popes,
whom the city on the lagoon opposed in the name of the authority of
Christ, with the aspiration to expand the state of san Marco to much of
the rest of italy. This project came to an irreversible end with the defeat
of 1509, from which Venice and its ruling class never recovered. This
aspect is additionally characterized by the fact that Venice was the only
italian state in which the Protestant reform movement had a certain space
for expansion and enjoyed, for a brief period, a certain tolerance on the
part of the political powers. This expansion, which ended in the mid-16th
century but which left traces over the succeeding two decades, explains
the presence of the libertine ferment and free thinking that characterizes
Venetian culture in the 17th century, but which disappeared almost com-
pletely in the following century.