The manuscript of the life of Paolo Sarpi written by his disciple Fulgenzio Micanzio reached England in 1632, when Milton was composing Il Penseroso. Both the biography and the poem describe the protagonist as «penseroso» (pensive), melancholic, sober, dedicated to a hermitic life, and a profound inquirer into the secrets of nature. The kinship of Charles Diodati, Milton’s best friend, with the theologian Jean Diodati, an old collaborator of Sarpi's, makes this hypothesis even
more plausible. The reference of the poem to a «pensive nun» does not prevent us from hypothesizing that it was referred to Sarpi, because of some latent homosexual allusions included in Micanzio’s biography, which Milton could have easily
deciphered.
