that is, where there was a great and powerful court, full of ambassadors and minsters', where 'more than in any other city in the world one could see a multitude of personages and soldiers who had been ambassadors at all the courts of Europe and where civil questions were managed by nobles, where people practiced who possessed refined judicial abilities and were knowledgeable about the affairs of princes. Siri was referring to Venice, but Rome, the capital of the Catholic Church, was no different. Indeed, only a few years earlier Maiolino Bisaccioni, one of the many adventurous historian-gazetteers of the period, had declared 'Rome, as you know [is] the place where all the news in the world is found. The content and character of the avvisi differed between the two cities. Roman avvisi contained ecclesiastical, political, and criminal intrigue, taking advantage of opposing factions willing to divulge state secrets or official gossip for their own benefit. These were then read by church and government officials as well as the nobility. Such was the partisan (and sometimes scandalous) comments on public affairs that they became censored by the Pope and several copyists were imprisoned or executed. The celebrated Roman jurist Prospero Farinacci argued that the revelation of state secrets by the writers of newsletters was a crime that had to be punished no less seriously than the crimen laesae maiestatis. Venetian avvisi were more conservative in their coverage of such events and more preoccupied with commercial matters. 17th century Printed avvisi did not appear in Italy until the first half of the seventeenth century. Possible reasons for this were easier avoidance of censorship in hand-written form, reluctance of copyists to use printing technology (which they viewed as a threat to their job security), and clients desiring the status offered by hand-written information as opposed to the "vulgar" print. By the late 1630s manuscript news-sheets diminished in importance because of their limited circulation and high costs. Scholars suppose that the first newspaper printed in Italy was edited in Florence in 1636 by Amador Massi and Lorenzo Landi, but no issue was discovered to confirm that conjecture, therefore the newspaper Genova, printed from 1639, shall be considered the oldest printed newspaper in Italy. By the mid-seventeenth century irregularly printed news-sheets had become routine in many Italian cities. The Gazzetta di Mantova, the world's oldest newspaper still existing and published with the same name,