Italy and the colonization of the Americas

Italy and the colonization of the Americas was related to

Primarily:

An aborted attempt to create a colony in the Americas, in what is now French Guiana, made by the Grand Duchy of Tuscany in the early 1600s.
An attempt to create a colony in the Antilles by an Italian Grand Master of the Knights Hospitaller of Malta (then part of Sicily).
From circa 1518, merchants from the Genoese Republic ruled the commerce and the port of Old Panama (Panamá Viejo), the oldest European settlement on the Pacific coast of the Americas.

Secundarily:

Italian explorers and colonizers serving for other European nations;
the role played by the Pope in Christianizing the New World and resolving disputes between competing colonial powers.
Beginning in the first decades of the 19th century, there were "colonies" of Italians in many Latin American nations^[1]

^ The first "colony" of this type was attempted by the Italian-Venezuelan Luigi Castelli, who in 1841 wanted to create a colonial community of Tuscans and Piemontese in Venezuela to favor local agriculture. Unfortunately the ship was wrecked in the Mediterranean. Several of these Italian "colonies" were created in the second half of the 19th century, especially in Uruguay, Argentina, Chile, Mexico, Peru, Colombia, Ecuador and in the Southern Region of Brazil. In many of these Italian communities, Italian (or its dialects) is still spoken, such as in Rafaela in Argentina, Capitán Pastene in Chile, in Chipilo in Mexico or in Nova Veneza in the state of Santa Catarina of Brasil (where Brazilian Talian is used)