Suoni e strumenti dei Sami nel Viaggio settentrionale di Francesco Negri (1663-1666) e nell'immaginario musicale secentesco

Between 1663 and 1666, priest Francesco Negri from Ravenna widely explored the Scandinavian peninsula, for the first time reaching the North Cape from continental Europe. The goal of the trip was political and religious: the priest had probably been sent secretly to Stockholm by the French Embassy to lead a religious mission in a country considered a bulwark of Lutheranism, interrogating Catholics and bringing their confessions to Tridentine Europe. The report was written according to the perspective of Seventeenth-century natural philosophy, which can be clearly noticed through the attention paid by the author towards the sounds of the animals and the natural world. But above all, it is the part devoted to the Sami people which testifies the spread through Seventeenth-century continental Europe of the iconographic model of the typical Sami musical instrument, the drum for shamanic rituals, which is carefully described and illustrated in the text.