Sforza Pallavicino was a nobleman and an ecclesiastic, a poet and an art theoretician, a theologian and a historian. Over the course of his career, he became a prelate, a local governor, and a lecturer; he was a Jesuit and later also a cardinal. This essay does not delve into his biography or analyse his works and achievements. Rather, it sets the stage for his career and the variety of activities in which he was involved. It provides the backdrop of the complex institutional landscape in which he was embedded: Baroque Rome. Since Paolo Prodi's groundbreaking Il sovrano Pontefice: un corpo e due anime in 1981, and later its translation, published in 1989,1 a considerable body of scholarship has delved into Early Modern Rome, highlighting the peculiarities that resulted from the dual nature-spiritual and temporal-of papal sovereignty and elective monarchy. Both the centre of the Catholic world and the capital of a state, papal Rome possessed many mutually dependent features: an overrepresentation of the nobility and ecclesiastics in the government and in the city population in general; a supranational court that was the point of convergence for not just European diplomacy but also large communities of foreigners of all social standings; a peculiar, highly competitive pattern of elites and bureaucracy formation; and, most importantly, polycentrism, the papal court being just one of the clusters where politics occurred, not least because of the court's rapid turnover. The Counter-Reformation recast such intertwining of politics and religion in all regards, and made it more pervasive than ever.2