“Paintings are appealing things, and just about anybody might be tempted to steal them,” wrote Neapolitan poet Giovanni Battista Marino from Paris, worried about what might happen to the drawings and canvases he was expecting from Italy. He recommends that his correspondents “send them to me by a safe route...”.

Whose paintings and drawings is he referring to? Marino met Sinibaldo Scorza in Genoa, when the latter served his lengthy apprenticeship in the home/workshop of Giovanni Battista Paggi; probably as early as 1612-13, when Sinibaldo was just over twenty years old: he was born in 1589 in Voltaggio, in the Oltregiogo region [between present Liguria and Piedmont], once part of the Republic of Genoa.