ABSTRACT
In October 1549, Pietro Aretino wrote two urgent letters, very probably on the same day. One, addressed to Giovan Giacomo Passeri, general of the Order of Friars Minor Conventual, protests against the imprisonment of Fra Curado, of San Nicolò della Lattuga on the Campo dei Frari, who is suspected, it emerges, of being a Lutheran.1 Aretino assures the general that this ‘modest priest and most humble man’ is the innocent victim of envy and calumny.2 Fra Curado, he testifies, has been his confessor for sixteen years, a relationship giving him complete knowledge of the man’s character. Presenting himself as a religious moderate, Aretino makes an emotional appeal for the release of ‘my spiritual father, my Catholic father, my religious father’.3
