Italy and the colonization of the Americas

Italy and the colonization of the Americas was related to:

• Italian explorers and colonizers serving for other European nations;

• the role played by the Pope in Christianizing the New World and resolving disputes between competing colonial powers;

• From circa 1518, Genoese merchants ruled the commerce and the port of Old Panama (Panamá Viejo), the oldest European settlement on the Pacific coast of the Americas. The Genoese obtained this concession by the Spaniards, who had the Republic of Genoa as allies, primarily for its relevance in the slave trade of the New World (the Asiento de Negros monopoly was outsourced to Genoese merchants established in Seville in 1518). By the 17th century, the group of single-story structures known as "Casa de los Genoveses" stood between the port beach of "La Tasca" and the "Calle de los Calafates", thus dominating the entire bay of Panama Viejo on its Eastern side. It is believed to have been the property of Genoese merchants Domenico Grillo and Ambrogio Lomellini (holders of the Asiento de Negros in 1662–1671) and to have been the seat of the black slave trade in the ancient city. The Genoese kept the concession until the destruction of the original city, following the raid by the pirate Henry Morgan in 1671.

• an aborted attempt to create a colony in the Americas, in what is now French Guiana, made by the Grand Duchy of Tuscany in the early 1600s;

• an attempt to create a colony in the Antilles by an Italian Grand Master of the Knights Hospitaller of Malta (then part of Sicily).