Italy and the colonization of the Americas
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Italy and the colonization of the Americas was related to
Primarily:
- 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).
- From circa 1518, merchants from the Genoese Republic ruled the commerce and the port of Old Panama (Panamá Viejo), the oldest European settlement on the Pacific coast of the Americas.
Secundarily:
- 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.
- Beginning in the first decades of the 19th century, there were "colonies" of Italians in many Latin American nations[1]