Sguardi veneziani a Oriente : Ambrosio Bembo e il suo viaggio per parte dell'Asia

During its long existence the Republic of Venice always considered the East with renewed interest. From its initial, difficult relationship with Byzantium to its more and more vital commercial interests, from its trades with the Levant and the consequent need to keep its possessions by the routes in the eastern Mediterranean Sea, to its relationships with the Venetian colonies, which were stably settled in the Mediterranean Asia. The continuous expansion to the East in search of new territories for new trades represented a priority for Venice. Of such travels and explorations a copious quantity of tales, journals, first or second-hand reports have survived; all of them represent, if not really an autonomous genre in the Venetian literature, at least a corpus very rich in news, information and descriptions. The precious materials if, on one hand, increased the trades, on the other hand helped the Venetian society to acquire interesting descriptions of peoples, countries and far cultures, having customs which were still little (or not at all) known; so doing, they helped the beginning, in the modern age, of a delicate cultural process which culminated in an important sensitivity by the western culture towards the new and different “civilizations of the East”; those ones were established on values and traditions which were not easily assimilable in the European society of that time. A witness of that spirit was Ambrosio Bembo, a young Venetian patrician, a protagonist and a narrator of a very peculiar journey that he had been accomplishing in four years, in the second half of the Seventeenth century, from Venice to India and back. His journey is carefully described in his Viaggio e Giornale per parte dell'Asia di quattro anni incirca fatto da me Ambrosio Bembo Nobile Veneto. The present work of reasearch has intended to analyse Bembo's report deeply, even in comparison with other contemporary sources on travel literature, giving importance to the multiple references which can be caught as a sign of a peculiar interest for the themes of the cultural comparison and the representation of the Otherness.