Giovanni Battista Raimondi’s Travel in the Middle East

Abstract

The paper publishes the inedited document Miscellanea Medicea 719, ins. 56, n. 1 of Florence State Archive, containing the account of a journey by land from Hormuz to Venice, dated to 1575, preceded by a brief critical introduction. 19th century Italian historiography has attributed the account to Giovanni Battista Raimondi (1536 ca.-1614), scientific director of the Typographia Medicea (Rome 1584). Raimondi has been considered also as the author of the travel, describing his experience in the first person (plural). This paper argues, on linguistic and text-critical grounds, that Raimondi did not make such a travel, nor did he compose the account, but merely copied the document in the context of the preparation of a mission to Egypt and Persia of Giovanni Battista Vecchietti, who left to Alexandria in 1584, as a papal envoy.