Italy has influenced the culture of several nations through its artistic avant-garde over several centuries. Despite a certain lack of direct and obvious relations between the countries in the 16th and 17th centuries, Portugal inherited various elements of the attractive Italian culture, illuminating the paths of the Portuguese arts, particularly music. The assimilation of Mannerism, an Italian artistic style, into music, can be seen in the appearance of the Tento genre, which was closer to the Italian Ricercare, as in the works of Carreira and Cavazzoni, although it developed with an autochthonous expression. The presence of a large number of works by Italian composers in one of the most important sources of keyboard music in Portugal - Manuscript 964 from the Braga District Archive - from which “Aria con variation” is extracted, shows the influence of Italian art, evident in the production of Pedro de Araújo, whose Consonances are similar in style to the toccate de durezze” and legature. At the beginning of the 18th century, the huge undertaking of liturgical and musical reform, carried out by King João V, radically altered musical taste in Portugal.  The adoption of the Vatican's liturgical ceremonials, the hiring of musicians from the Cappella Giulia (the Papal musical chapel) and the sending of Portuguese scholarship holders to study music in Rome resulted in a break with Portuguese musical tradition and a vast repertoire of sacred music and keyboard sonatas and toccatas, bequeathed to us by Seixas and many other composers, imbued with an Italian taste. The Italian presence can also be seen in organs and organ builders in Portugal, such as Pascoal Caetano Oldovini, a Genoese organ builder who was active mainly in the centre-south region of Portugal, and the organs of the Chapel of Nossa Senhora da Saúde in Lisbon and the Church of Nossa Senhora da Graça in Tomar. The art of Portuguese organbuilding itself assimilated some elements from Italian organbuilding, such as the inclusion of the Human Voice register and the adaptation of the tira tutti system.