Abstract

The article is dedicated to the decryption of a private Paolo Sarpi's writing, kept in Palazzo Donà dalle Rose: the "Pensieri medico-morali". The writing looks like a moral instruction given to someone and presents great hermeneutical difficulties. Vittorio Frajese interprets the text as an homosexual point of view in moral philosophy. The author starts from this point to outline some fragments of the homophile network which Sarpi was part of and its impact on the administration of justice in Venice. In the first half of the seventeenth century, this administration experienced a substantial decriminalization of sodomy.