Venetians in America: Nicolò Zen and the Virtual Exploration of the New World*

Abstract

AbstractIn 1558, the Venetian patrician Nicolò Zen publishedDello scoprimento, a text that suggested that his Venetian ancestors had made landfall in the Americas before Columbus. Generations of scholars have pored over Zen’s text and accompanying map with the hopes of determining whether or not this voyage took place. Zen’s text, however, cannot be classified as either history or fiction; like many other early modern travel accounts, it was a combination of both. Shifting the focus about what is significant from the text’s truthfulness to its tactics, from the historicity of the voyage to the mechanics of the composition, reveals a series of fascinating textual strategies surrounding the European production of knowledge about the New World. Specifically, Zen followed well-established patterns for European travel writing, playing with quotation, pastiche, and temporality in order to depict his fellow Venetians as experts on the Americas and as viable contestants in the race to New World empire.