Schede epistolari per Angelo Grillo, Pio Muzio e Fortunato Olmo

This study picks up and makes some remarks on ten letters that did not receive scholar attention up to now because of their dispersal in collections and in archives not immediatly important in the context of benedictine monastic history. Written or received in different moments of the first half of the seventeenth century by three main exponents of the cassinese culture – Angelo Grillo, Pio Muzio and Fortunato Olmo , all these letters show a strong link with the learned milieu in Spanish Lombardy and most of the times with cardinal Federico Borromeo and his erudite court. If considered altogether, they also show a remarkable skill that cassinese scholarship often had in fitting its intellectual energies depending on circumstances, not only using them for purely artistic purposes, but more often in order to develope in various ways useful relationships, nets of patronage and recommendation opportunities.