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Abstract: My article is an intellectual profile of one of the most important Italian controversialists of the sixteenth century. It offers a new perspective on the sixteenth century Italian religious crisis. This enigmatic jurist from Siena, who entered the Dominican order in 1517 with the name of Ambrogio Catarino deciding to follow Savonarola, started his career as an anti-Lutheran controversialist while sharing friendships with the Italian Spirituali and often being in conflict with his own order. He ended his career as an anti-Savonarolian polemicist, after participating as a protagonist in many of the discussions of the Council of Trent. This article aims to provide a key to interpretation of the many, apparently incompatible and contradictory aspects of his personality. My intellectual profile modifies the traditional image of Politi as the intransigent hunter of heretics to the extent of calling into question the solidity of the main historiographical categories used until now to describe the Italian Religious Crisis of the sixteenth century. In other words, the article attempts to provide the image of another Counter-Reformation, different from the one that prevailed at Trent, the image of a possible and practicable alternative that did not, however, succeed.