This panel, the first in a series, provides case studies of how Italians throughout the peninsula reacted to the 1527 Sack of Rome, both in its immediate aftermath and over the next several decades. Jessica Goethals will introduce the Sack through the eyes of Marcello Alberini, a Roman patrician who recorded events for his family. Elizabeth McCahill will discuss the ways in which Jacopo Sadoleto, papal secretary to Clement VII, used the concept of the respublica Christianain efforts to forestall the Sack and then to imagine recovery from it. Antonio Pattori will weave together varied testimonies as to how, in the 1540s and 1550s, political views around the renewed crisis between Emperor and Pope were shaped by the trauma and memory of 1527. In short, the panel explores the Sack not just as a catastrophic event but as one that shaped family memory, ecclesiology, and political perspectives for many decades.