Believing in God, believing in demons Stories of libertinism, disbelief and strange alliances made against doubt in modern Venice

The essay is concerned with the coexistence of libertine and magical themes and sensibilities, with or without explicit references to the diabolical world. In other words, it wants to show how there contiguous areas existed between lack of belief and magical beliefs, often to the point of creating original crossover effects at both the cultured and popular levels. This paper considers the case of the Republic of Venice between the sixteenth and eigheenth centuries.