Page 42 - Lanzarotto Malocello from Italy to the Canary Islands

42 from Italy to the Canary Islands

hroughout the whole of the Late Middle Ages, between 1200 and
1400 – but perhaps even earlier – the Canary Islands were the most
persistently dreamed of among the “Happy Isles” which were be-
lieved to rise up somewhere in the mysterious and insuperable Atlantic Ocean,
those which had already provided Greek and Celtic mythology with dreamlike
material and which were perhaps sometimes lit up in the haze before mission-
aries-sailors such as Saint Brendan. The most beautiful of the islands, the “Un-
found Island”, filled the dreams of Sancho Panza and even those of poet Guido
Gozzano, inspiring even singer and songwriter Francesco Guccini.
The Middle Ages, full of bestiaries, herbariums and lapidaries, is no less
brimming with “collections of islands”, which we should not hastily define
lightly as “fantastical”. These may well have contained private fantasies and
the outcomes of casual hallucinations, but they also contained the knowledge
of classical auctores, experience of sailing, voices spread and handed down.
Even back then people navigated, or “surfed” in a room, by reading an old
book; and on the contrary, they meditated deeply when they were alone, dis-
mayed before the silent sea or when terrified by a bellowing storm.
Lanzarotto Malocello’s destiny is written, deep down, in his Christian name
and surname, seemingly so strange, yet so natural, almost obvious, in his Geno-
an origins. Lanzarotto, a bellicose name evoking the knightly jousting “lance”,
is the Genoan version of “Lancelot”, the name of the knight of the Round Ta-
th
ble proposed well into the 12 century by Chrétien de Troyes, which became
Lancillotto in Italy; just as Perceval, of the same origin, had become Parzival
in Germany and Percivalle in Genoa, a recurring name in the Doria household,
too. We should not be surprised by the fact that the Genoese, at least from the
second half of the 1200s, gave their sons the names of the great heroes of Ar-
thurian knightly literature. The vogue of Graal novels had invaded the whole
of 1200s Europe, together with the vogue of the knights, but in particular, in
Genoa, towards the end of the century, the bishop-hagiographer-chronicler,
the Dominican Iacopo from Varazze, made an old plate in green opaque glass,
which had been stored in the treasury of the cathedral of St. Lawrence for al-
most two centuries, into the so-called “Sacro Catino”, the holy basin, which
was taken by the Genoese crusaders to Caesarea Palestinae in 1102 as a trophy,
which was in actual fact a glorious city palladium, as it was identifiable with no
less than the cup in which Jesus blessed the wine during the Last Supper.
In the “vulgate” of the Graal novels, Lancelot is the father of the purest
hero of the Round Table, Galahad. But it should come as no surprise if, in that
Genoa of the Middle Ages, resonant with iron and with the smell of tar from
the shipyards, a family called Malocello had the idea of giving their child the