This contribution analyses the representation of India in Pietro della Valle's Viaggi, with particular attention to ritual practices, forms of asceticism, and religious beliefs observed in the regions visited. Through the lens of humanistic antiquarianism and Counter-Reformation Catholicism, Della Valle constructs an India that is both empirically described and theologically judged, in which Hindu and Jain rituals are often reduced to the categories of "superstition", "madness", and diabolical deception. The descriptions of the theriomorphic forms of certain Hindu deities and practices, such as the worship of sacred trees, Yoga and Tantrism, the veneration of the liṅga and ahiṃsā, represent privileged moments in which wonder, ethnography, and the certainty of Christian superiority coexist. Using classical models and Christian interpretative categories, Pietro della Valle constructs a "map" of India that makes the religious phenomena he encounters intelligible, but at the price of only a partial understanding of Indian ritual practices and religious conceptions. His gaze, at once antiquarian, humanistic, and ethnographic, reveals a constant ambivalence between cognitive openness, cultural projections, and normative judgement. While showing the inevitable limitations of his hermeneutic devices, according to Jonathan Z. Smith, "maps are all we possess" to describe the territory and access religious otherness.