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

by Andrea di Robilant

Knopf 2024

Andrea di Robilant devotes the bulk of This Earthly Globe, his sixth book on a Venetian theme, to the travels of several early modern explorers: Antonio Pigafetta’s circumnavigation of the world, the Venetian merchant Cadamosto’s exploration of the coasts of west Africa, the “swashbuckling adventurer” Ludovico di Varthema’s exploits in India, Leo Africanus’s journeys across northern Africa, the Portuguese priest Francisco Álvares’s time in Ethiopia, the historian Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo y Valdés’s natural history of the West Indies, Marco Polo’s famous travels in Asia. Di Robilant unites these stories by detailing how the Venetian civil servant Giovambattista Ramusio (1485-1557) tracked down accounts of these travels, which often existed only in manuscript, and edited them for inclusion in his three-volume masterpiece Navigations and Voyages, “one of the great publishing feats of the sixteenth century. It played a vital role in the final emancipation from a vision of the world still anchored to antiquity and became an indispensable source for the great cartographers of the second half of the sixteenth century.”

It is this last story—the story of Navigations and Voyages—that animates di Robilant’s book, and it is wonderfully chosen. The cartographers of Renaissance Europe faced an immense intellectual challenge. The standard map of the world, derived from the second-century cartographer Ptolemy, contained three continents surrounded by water: Africa, Asia, and Europe. But the geographic reports coming back from a number of overseas voyages and expeditions were becoming impossible to square with the Ptolemaic view. Realizing this, Ramusio published Navigations and Voyages in order “to consign to history the age-old Ptolemaic model of the world inherited from antiquity.” He succeeded, and Navigations and Voyages became one of the great achievements of the age.

Unfortunately, di Robilant shies from his subject. Despite stressing the epochal significance of Ramusio’s work, di Robilant leaves the reader wondering what kind of book Navigations and Voyages is. He implies that it provided a “suitable framework” for dealing with the welter of new geographic information, but he does not explain that framework. At times he writes as if Navigations and Voyages is an anthology of travelogues, at others that it is a synthesis of geographic reports. “Ramusio’s voice runs through every page of the volume.” The exact contents are not listed, nor is there a discussion of the maps Ramusio included. This Earthly Globe contains reproductions of some of those maps, drawn by the cartographer Giacomo Gastaldi, but questions about how those maps were drawn, how they differed from earlier maps, and how they influenced Europeans’ understanding of the world go unanswered. These are disappointing omissions, made more disappointing by the knowledge that “Gerhard Mercator, the Flemish mathematician who gave us the first modern map of the world (1569), owned and consulted all three volumes of the Ramusio trilogy.”

In his chapter on Marco Polo, di Robilant sets the stage well. Early sixteenth-century scholars believed that Polo had larded his narrative with fabulous tales, but Ramusio was not content with the general verdict. Comparing the standard published version with an older manuscript, Ramusio concluded that brazen interpolation and scribal error had introduced many fantastical elements. “Ramusio carefully collated the two manuscripts, making verifications and edits and changes along the way. He even added elements here and there when he felt he was on firm ground.”

This is promising stuff. Details about Ramusio’s editorial labors—how he excised the inauthentic and promoted the accurate—would illuminate the significance of Navigations and Voyages. But the promise goes unfulfilled. Instead of detailing how Ramusio transformed one of Europe’s most mistrsuted books into a fount of geographic knowledge, di Robilant settles for a thirty-page summary of Marco Polo’s adventures.

Ultimately, This Earthly Globe works best as an introduction to early modern exploration. Ramusio’s life and work become a frame on which di Robilant hangs retellings of the adventures of Cadamosto and others:

One day the natives killed a baby elephant with poisoned lances and arrows. Battimansa offered the dead animal to Cadamosto, who observed that, “though young, he was the equivalent of five or six of our bulls.” He took a large chunk of elephant meat back to the boat and had a slice roasted and another one stewed to taste the difference. The meat was “tough and not very good,” but he ate it anyway so he could say that he had eaten something “no one else back home has ever eaten.”

Such anecdotes are interesting—at least when taken by themselves. Yet surrounded as they are by hints of a yet more interesting book, they become reminders of how incurious This Earthly Globe is and of the unfulfilled promise at its heart. If di Robilant’s estimate of Navigations and Voyages is correct, Ramusio—and readers—deserve a better book.

Will Ramsay is a book critic living in Alabama.