Imagining the Americas in Medici Florence by Markey Lia

Author:Markey, Lia
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Pennsylvania State University Press

Chapter One

1. This is true for other regions in Europe. For instance, in his examination of the Dutch response to the New World in the early modern period, Innocence Abroad, Benjamin Schmidt has shown that there was no single European response to the Americas and that each case must be examined separately. See also Johnson, Cultural Hierarchy. Benjamin Keen devotes several pages to the Italian response: Aztec Image in Western Thought, 139–44. Though Walter D. Mignolo does not discuss the Italian situation in particular, he does make clear that his study is focused on the Spanish and Portuguese and the very different “Renaissance” they endured through colonization: Darker Side of the Renaissance. See also Surdich, Verso il Nuovo Mondo. Sources that do not always account for regional differences in the response to the New World but remain critical for this text include Mason, Deconstructing America, and Rabasa, Inventing America.

2. See Romeo, Scoperte americane (reprint of Romeo’s 1954 text); M. Benzoni, Cultura italiana e il Messico; Donattini, Dal Nuovo Mondo all’America. Other relatively recent Italian publications include Vannini de Gerulewicz, America agli occhi dei primi scopritori; Americhe; Prosperi and Reinhard, Nuovo mondo nella coscienza italiana e tedesca; and Airaldi and Formisano, Scoperta nelle relazioni. For further historiography and bibliography on Italy and the New World, please see the introduction and an essay by Liz Horodowich in Horodowich and Markey, Discovery of the New World, forthcoming.

3. This translation is from Guicciardini, History of Italy, 179. “Degni, e i portogallesi e gli spagnuoli e precipuamente Colombo, inventore di questa più maravigliosa e più pericolosa navigazione, che con eterne laudi sia celebrata la perizia la industria l’ardire la vigilanza e le fatiche loro, per le quali è venuta al secolo nostro notizia di cose tanto grandi e tanto inopinate. Ma più degno di essere celebrato il proposito loro se a tenti pericoli e fatiche gli avesse indotti non la sete immoderate dell’oro e delle ricchezze ma la cupidità o di dare a se stessi e agli altri questa notizia o di propagare la fede cristiana.” Guicciardini, Storia d’Italia, 644.

4. On Bembo’s statement, see Perocco, “‘Un male non pensato,’” 287, and McCarthy-King, “Voyage of Columbus.” At the start of book 6 of his history, Bembo describes the discovery as “un male non pensato da lontane genti e regioni eziandio le venne.” Bembo, “Della istoria viniziana,” 347.

5. A survey of two compilation texts demonstrates that more works written about the New World in the sixteenth century were published in Italy: Alden and Landis, European Americana, and G. Cole, Catalogue of Books. The notion that Italy was the center for the publication and dissemination of information about the New World was already put forward in 1892 by Berchet, Fonti italiane per la storia della scoperta, 1:XVII.

6. See Bellini, “Scoperta del Nuovo Mondo.”

7. Symcox, Letters, Dispatches, and Papal Bulls, 7. This text and Symcox’s Italian Reports on America, 1493–1522: Accounts by Contemporary Observers are edited and translated editions of Berchet, Fonti italiane per la storia della scoperta.

8. Maria

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