Giovanni Battista Ramusio: The Quiet Architect of the Age of Discovery

A Venetian civil servant who never crossed an ocean, and gave Europe its first great library of voyages

Giovanni Battista Ramusio was born in 1485 in the Venetian Republic, and spent his life at the quiet centre of the most information-rich city in Europe. He was a humanist, a friend of scholars, and for decades a trusted servant of the Venetian state, secretary to the Senate and later to the Council of Ten, the inner sanctum of Venetian power. Through his hands passed the reports of ambassadors, the letters of merchants, and the accounts of travellers returning from every corner of the known and newly discovered world.

Venice lived by trade and intelligence, and Ramusio quietly became the great collector of that intelligence. Over many years he gathered, translated and edited the first-hand narratives of explorers and merchants into a single monumental work: Delle navigationi et viaggi, On Navigations and Voyages.

Published in three folio volumes beginning in 1550, it was the first great anthology of voyages, predating the more famous English collections of Richard Hakluyt by a generation, and in many ways their model. Between its covers Ramusio assembled the travels of Marco Polo, the circumnavigation of Magellan as recorded by Pigafetta, the voyages of Vasco da Gama, the conquests of Cortés, and the exploration of the Americas, Africa and Asia, a whole library of discovery in one carefully edited set.

The dramatic part is a disaster. In November 1557 a fire tore through the printing house of the Giunti, destroying woodblocks and materials prepared for the second volume. Ramusio himself died that same year, before his masterpiece was complete; the delayed second volume finally appeared, with apologies, in 1559. He had worked, characteristically, in near-anonymity, a modest civil servant who never sought fame, even as he assembled one of the most important geographical works of the Renaissance.

Ramusio's achievement was editorial rather than nautical: he never crossed an ocean. But by gathering, comparing and translating the scattered testimony of those who had, he gave Europe its first coherent, critical picture of the wider world. Mapmakers and scholars mined his volumes for a century.

To open a set of the Navigationi et viaggi is to open the notebook of the Age of Discovery itself, the place where Europe first read its own expanding horizon.