Tentative Italian colonization of the Americas

The Italian colonization of the Americas was limited to an aborted attempt by the Grand Duchy of Tuscany to create a colony in South America in the early 17th century.
Ferdinando I of Tuscany in 1608 organized an expedition under captain Robert Thornton, in order to explore northern Brazil and the Amazon river and to prepare for the establishment of a settlement in northern coastal South America, which would serve as a base to export mainly precious Brazilian wood and spices to Renaissance Italy.
Ferdinando I de' Medici colonial tentative
, Grand Duke of Tuscany, oversaw the only Italian attempt to create a colony in the Americas.
Ferdinando I of Tuscany at the beginning of the 17th century tried to create a commercial colony in northern Brasil, in order to explote the richness of the Amazon jungle. He wanted to control the flourishing trade of precious woods, spices and minerals from northern South America toward Renaissance Italy.
He contacted Robert Dudley about his 1595 Amazonian exploration and received the advice from him to research gold in the Amazon and Orinoco rivers. So, in 1608 Dudley convinced the duke to send the privateer galleon Santa Lucia Buonaventura to Guiana and northern Brazil.
For this reason Ferdinando gave captain Thornton this galleon and a little supporting ship for an expedition in 1608. Thornton sailed from the newly created port of Livorno and reached Guyana and Brasil, exploring the Amazon and Orinoco rivers. In July 1609 he was back in Leghorn (Livorno), but in February of that year the Grand Duke died and in Florence nobody was interested in establishing an overseas colony.
So, when Thornton returned to Tuscany a year later, he found Ferdinando I dead, and his successor uninterested in the establishment of a colony. Thornton was ready to sail back to the area between the rivers Orinoco and Amazon in the summer of 1609 with Italian settlers from Livorno and Lucca, but the project was scrapped.
Indeed, Thornton's galleon "Santa Lucia" returned to Italy in 1609 with plenty of information (after exploring the area between Trinidad and the delta of the Amazon river), some natives and tropical parrots.
The area that Thornton considered as a possible site of an Italian colony now lies in modern French Guyana (near Cayenne), which would be colonised by France a few years later, in 1630.

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