A Venetian civil servant whose massive collection of travel accounts, published in Venice in the 1550s, became a vital source of knowledge about the world beyond Europe’s borders for readers across the Continent.
Born in Treviso in July 1485, Giovanni was the son of Paolo Ramusio, who was trained in the law but worked as a translator, publishing Valturio’s Precepta Militaria in Verona in 1483. Paolo died in 1506. By that time his son, who had gone to Padua for study, was well on his way to a career in the Venetian civil service. In 1505 he began work as a chancellery clerk, traveling with Alvise Mocenigo, the Venetian envoy to France. During the trip he went to Blois, Tours, and probably Paris. By the time of his return in May 1507, he was such an expert in French that his linguistic skills became renowned in the republic. His knowledge put him into contact with the highest echelons of the Venetian state because the doge himself called upon the young Ramusio to serve as a translator for him. In 1515 he became a secretary to the senate, where he remained for 18 years. In 1533 he took a position as secretary to the Council of Ten, one of the ruling bodies of the Venetian republic that worked from the ducal palace. He kept that position for the rest of his working life. During his time in Venice he became close to a number of leading scholars of his day, including Girolamo Frascatoro (1483-1553), Andrea Navagero (1483-1529), and Pietro Bembo (1470-1547). When Navagero and Bembo, each of whom served time as the curator of the Biblioteca Marciana, traveled, Ramusio substituted in running Venice’s marvelous library, work that often entailed finding material for the absent curators.
There are few extant details about Ramusio’s life, but there is no doubt about his greatest achievement: the publication of an enormous three-volume set of travel accounts published under the title Navigationi e Viaggi. The books included the reports of travelers across the world. Ramusio at one point recorded why he decided the project was so important. “Seeing and considering that the maps of Ptolemy’s Geographia describing Africa and India were very imperfect in respect of the great knowledge that we have of those regions,” he wrote in the first volume of the Navigationi, published in 1550, “I thought it proper and perhaps not a little useful to bring together the narrations of writers of our day who have been in the aforesaid parts of the world and spoken of them in detail, so that, supplementing them from the description in the Portuguese nautical charts, other maps could be made to give the greatest satisfaction to those who take pleasure in such knowledge.”
Ramusio apparently had little initial interest in publishing the results of his scholarly research. During his age many scholars were content to circulate their manuscripts to small groups of like-minded individuals. But by the late 1540s he had decided that publication made sense. Because Venice was one of the publishing centers of Europe (see PRINTING PRESs), and because its merchants were the crucial intermediaries between East and West, he could not have been in a better place. Because he knew Greek, Latin, Hebrew, Spanish, French, and Portuguese, he was able to translate a wide variety of texts into Italian. The decision to publish in Italian instead of Latin meant that his texts would have readers who were not scholars. Perhaps as a result of Ramusio’s decision, other sets of travel accounts published in the 16th century also appeared in vernacular instead of classical languages.
Ramusio’s books gave to European readers information that none had ever seen before. In the first volume of the Navigationi, published in 1550, Ramusio included Leo AFRiCANUS’s masterful and detailed description of Africa, as well as other writings such as the Venetian Alvise Ca’da Mosto’s account of his trip to Africa, Pedro Alvares Cabral’s report of his journey to India, the report of VASCO DA Gama, and Amerigo Vespucci’s so-called Soderini letter describing South America. The second volume, published in 1559 (after the publication of the third volume), included the account of MARCO PoLO and various accounts of travelers across Europe. The third volume, published in 1556, included accounts of the Western Hemisphere. Ramusio included a summary of Peter Martyr’s Decades of the New World, accounts relating to the expeditions of FRANCisco Coronado in search of the Seven Cities of Cibola, reports on HERNAN coRTEs’s conquest of Mexico, and a report by one of Francisco Pizarro’s men of the Spanish conquest of Peru. This volume also included the first publication of some of the reports of Jacques Cartier’s expeditions to Canada, which Ramusio translated from French into Italian before the accounts were published in France, and also the “Natural and General History of the West Indies” by his associate GoNZALo Fernandez de Oviedo y Valdes, a work that included a depiction of corn (maize) that became the standard view of the plant in early modern Europe.
Ramusio’s collection had an enormous influence on others who decided to publish travel accounts, such as Richard Hakluyt the Younger and Samuel Purchas. Unlike those later English editors, however, Ramusio did not link the translation and publication of reports to any obvious political agenda. Instead, he seemed interested primarily in promoting the better understanding of geography and recognized the invaluable contributions that firsthand accounts made in expanding knowledge about the nations and resources of the earth. He wanted his texts to commemorate, as he put it, “the greatest and most marvellous things which our age has seen”—things about the “many and varied countries of this globe never known to the ancients.” Still, although he made no obvious link between his translations and any desire to reignite imperial ambitions in Venice, Ramusio did hope to profit from a venture he set up with Oviedo. According to the scheme, Oviedo would arrange for the shipment of goods from Hispaniola to Venice, where Ramusio and others would sell them. There is little evidence that this commerce had much success.
Ramusio died in July 1557 and was buried in the Chiesa della Madonna dell’ Orto. Although his grave can no longer be identified, the church sits on a quiet edge of Venice, its bell tower looking out over the Adriatic Sea. The great Renaissance painter Jacobo Tintoretto (1518-94) is buried there, also, and his paintings alone, including his series of the “Last Judgment,” make a pilgrimage to the church well worth the effort.
Further reading: Antonello Gerbi, Nature in the New World: From Christopher Columbus to Gonzalo Fernandez de Oviedo, trans. Jeremy Moyle (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1985); George B. Parks, “Ramusio’s Literary History,” Studies in Philology 45 (1955): 127-148; ———, “Contents and Sources of Ramusio’s Navigationi,” Bulletin of the New York Public Library 59 (1955): 279-313; Gian Battista Ramusio, Navigationi et Viaggi (Amsterdam:
Theatrum Orbis Terrarum, 1970);-, Navigationi e
Viaggi, ed. Marica Milanesi, 6 vols. (Rome: Giulio Einaudi, 1986).
World History
