In this talk I will discuss my new research project, which explores Orientalist scholarship in Rome from the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries. I will argue that early modern Rome was a Mediterranean entrepôt of information, facilitating the circulation of people, knowledge, and materials between Christian and Islamic societies. At the same time I will argue that Islamic religion and society were marginal subject matter to Oriental philologists in Rome and elsewhere in early modern Europe. Finally, I will speculate about the implications of these arguments for our understanding of the history of academic Orientalism as it evolved in the transition from the early modern to modern periods.