[on the world of Rome which Caravaggjo painted] It is the demimonde of Thomas Nashe and Thomas Dekker translated into Italian: a universe thronged with swaggering youths and pox-ridden doxies, pickpockets and con men, pimps and procuresses, beggars, drunks and roaring boys in a sordid ambiente of noxious stenches, insalubrious lodgings, slashed faces and salacious pasquinades.