Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
This Earthly Globe: A Venetian Geographer and the Quest to Map the World

This Earthly Globe: A Venetian Geographer and the Quest to Map the World

Di Robilant, Andrea

Paperback

Literary FiguresMedieval & Renaissance HistoryItalian History

Publisher Price: $19.00

ISBN10: 0307743845
ISBN13: 9780307743848
Publisher: Vintage
Published: Nov 18 2025
Pages: 272
Weight: 0.62
Height: 0.87 Width: 5.33 Depth: 8.00
Language: English
From the author of the best-selling A Venetian Affair (A narrative of novelistic resonance . . . Astonishing --The Washington Post), the story of an Italian Renaissance book editor who introduced European minds to the wider world through his passion for geography

An extraordinary story that reads more like a thriller than a book about history. A dazzling tale, brilliantly told. --Peter Frankopan, author of The Silk Roads and The Earth Transformed

In the autumn of 1550, a thick volume containing a wealth of geographical information new to Europeans, with startling woodcut maps of Africa, India and Indonesia, was published in Venice under the title Navigationi et Viaggi (Journeys and Navigations). The editor of this remarkable collection of travelogues, journals and classified government reports remained anonymous. Two additional volumes delivered the most accurate information available at the time on Asia and the New World. The three volumes together constituted an unparalleled release of geographical data into the public domain. It was, Andrea di Robilant writes, the biggest Wikileak of the Renaissance.

In This Earthly Globe, di Robilant brings to life not just the palace intrigues, editorial wheedling, delicate alliances and vibrant curiosity that resulted in this coup, but also its mastermind, editor Giovambattista Ramusio. Learned and self-effacing, he gathered a vast array of both popular and closely guarded narratives, from the journals of Marco Polo (he fact-checked them!) to detailed reports on Northern African cultures from the Muslim scholar and diplomat al-Hasan ibn Mohammad al-Wazzan (later known as Leo Africanus). Diverse voices spill out from these chapters as di Robilant recounts how Ramusio pursued the sources, and how he understood both the darker episodes

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