Though the majority of the Medici Archives are filled with records of day-to-day communication in a large bureaucracy, there are several entertaining reports from agents and observers from the political power centres of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century western Europe. So much detailed information was sent from cities such as Rome, Milan, Madrid, Antwerp and London on a regular basis that accounts were written in the form of an avviso, or hand-written news-sheet.
