Caravaggio died on 18 July 1610 at Porto Ercole, a Spanish-garrisoned port on the Tuscan coast, aged 38. He was on his way to Rome to collect a papal pardon. The traditional answer is a fever, but the cause was never settled.
He had been on the run for four years, since he killed a man in Rome in 1606. Through the Colonna family, a pardon finally looked within reach, and he sailed from Naples with three paintings meant for the pope's nephew, Cardinal Scipione Borghese.
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Nobody who stood on that beach wrote down what happened.
The fever comes from biographers who wrote later. The harshest, the rival painter Giovanni Baglione, said Caravaggio died "as miserably as he had lived." The earliest trace is a letter to the Duke of Urbino, which says only that on 28 July "we had news of the death." Ten days had already passed.
Since 2010 the case has been reopened with a lead test on old bones, a genetic match, a bacterium found in a tooth and a theory of murder. Each one cracks the fever story a little more. None of them settles it.
What You'll Discover
Why he was on that beach.
Who actually saw him die.
Who wanted him dead.
Where scientists went looking for him.
What was found in his teeth.