The accession of Elizabeth to the English throne initiated what was to be the longest and relatively most stable period in Tudor history. And yet the Elizabethan era was consistently marked by paradox: at no time before had elite English culture been so preoccupied with the world beyond its island limits and never in its recent history had the country been so isolated from the rest of the world; the great colonizing power that England was to become in the later sixteenth century was ruled by a sovereign who seldom traveled more than a hundred miles from London but who nevertheless had an easy command of Italian, French, Latin, and Greek; and despite the queen's formidable intellectual gifts, the culture that she encouraged was characterized by a distinctly anti-intellectual tenor, many of the most distinguished minds of the epoch over which she presided marked more for their distance from court than by their proximity to it. The position of the Italian in England in the Elizabethan period is indelibly marked by the same incongruities, for while one of the queen's closest personal associates was an Italian immigrant, many of the most significant Italian voices in these years registered only slightly, if at all, in the royal ear.