Giovan Battista Vecchietti and the Muses of the World: An Italian Poet in India and Persia
Speaker: Lorenzo Amato (PhD, University of Florence) is Professor of Italian at the University of Tokyo. His research focuses on Latin and Italian Renaissance poetry, the Florentine poetic tradition between the late Cinquecento and the early Baroque in particular.
Moderator: Pier Mattia Tommasino, Columbia University
This seminar focuses on Giovan Battista Vecchietti’s Italian poetry that Lorenzo Amato recently rediscovered in an autograph manuscript preserved at the Vatican Library (ms. Vat. Lat. 8853). Giovan Battista Vecchietti (1552–1619) was a Florentine humanist, papal nuncio, diplomatic agent, traveller and book-hunter across the Near East, Persia, and India. While his activity as a diplomat and as an expert of Persian language and the Persianate world have long been acknowledged, his poetry has remained almost entirely unknown until recently. The talk will closely examine the Italian poems that Vecchietti wrote between Persia and India, situating them at the intersection of Italian Renaissance poetry, Persian garden aesthetics, and early modern diplomatic mobility.
This event is part of the Italian and Mediterranean Colloquium organized by the Department of Italian and sponsored by the European Institute
