This project proposes an unprecedented archival and primary text investigation of Italian patrons and poets who bore directly upon the earliest literary formations of Miguel de Cervantes. My dissertation, “The Unknown History of the Invention of Don Quijote,” investigates Cervantes’s literary career prior to 1605, with a concentrated focus on the period of 1565–85. Of this twenty-year period, Cervantes spent roughly six in Italy (1568/69–1575) and five in Algiers (1575–80), where he also dialogued with Italian authors such as the Sicilian poet Antonio Veneziano. My dissertation casts into doubt the romantic hero, the ingenio lego, and the picaresque figure which represent the most accepted interpretations of Cervantes’s biography to date. Drawing on archival documents for Ascanio Colonna and Giulio Acquaviva, Cervantes’s first patrons, and early printings and manuscripts in Rome, this project recontextualizes Cervantes and Italy through a documented historical study.