The war of Spanish succession and the peace of 1713 constitute an important watershed in Italian affairs: the Habsburg settlement in Milan and Naples; the rise of the Savoy; the crisis of the small principalities of Renaissance origin; the prevalence of economic and commercial reasons in diplomatic relations. These are the central events of a phase of high "diplomatic density" in which the Italian ruling classes are measured both with the assertion of the Habsburg family and with new forms of legitimization of the hegemony of the European powers. Given the importance of the period, there are few studies on Italian ambassadors of these years, on their cultural formation and on their diplomatic action. Starting from some documents of diplomatic practice, the essay seeks to delineate some research tracks on the formation and use of 'diplomatic knowledge'. The first is a Mantua Instruction for the Caesarean Court (1691), a document that reveals how much the political culture of the Po Valley duchies was conditioned by the links with the Empire, but which also shows a reworking and use of the writings on the 'good ambassador’ elaborated along the seventeenth century. Other sources to decipher the diplomatic culture of the time are the dispatches of the two representatives of Venice to Utrecht, Sebastiano Foscarini and Carlo Ruzzini, documents that also allow us to question the value that the congress of Utrecht had, for minor and 'neutral' states as the Venetian Republic, as a moment to re-elaborate its political vision of Europe and as an occasion for updating the same diplomatic language.
