Page 46 - Lanzarotto Malocello from Italy to the Canary Islands

46 from Italy to the Canary Islands

o more than the thin record on the ill-fated attempt carried out in
1291 by Ugolino and Vadino Vivaldi to “go to the Indies taking
with them useful goods”, brought to us by Jacopo Doria in the
Annali genovesi [Annals of Genoa], can help us to understand how already
1
in the second half of the 1200s, in the most active and entrepreneurial
economic and trade areas of the Mediterranean, the need to search for and
open up new routes of access to the Asian continent - by sailing around
Africa or by crossing the Atlantic Ocean, therefore by breaking the bar-
riers of the many universes which had until then been closed in on them-
selves - had begun to take shape, to which the city chronicles proudly laid
th
th
claim. Between the end of the 15 century and the start of the 16 century,
this process enabled Vasco de Gama to land on the Deccan coast, Christo-
pher Columbus to reach the Antilles, Vasco Nunez de Balboa to set sail on
the Pacific and Ferdinando Magellano to be the first to sail all around the
world, contributing decidedly to the radical change of conception of the
world fuelled for centuries by religious imagery, in which space was seen
not as an owned asset or something to conquer, but as a gift from God,
filled with symbolical meaning able to connect physical reality to moral
and religious teaching.
It was however a contradictory process precisely for the group of ele-
ments that the global explosion of the Christian world and the consequent
change in the relationship between man and space had called into ques-
tion and which instead the culture of that time continued to underline and
repropose, as we are shown in the canto of Dante’s Inferno dedicated to
Ulysses’ “folle volo” (mad flight). This is if we are to accept the hypoth-
esis, put forward by several scholars, that Dante, who wrote this canto in
the early 1300s, may have taken inspiration in this case from the story of
the Vivaldi brothers, thus shipwrecking the Homeric hero’s ship near the
mountain of Paradise because he had dared to challenge the limits God
posed to human knowledge, symbolised by “quella foce stretta / dove Er-
cole segnò li suoi riguardi / acciò che l’uomo più oltre non si metta” (that
narrow passage / Where Hercules his landmarks set as signals, / That man
no farther onward should adventure”.
There was nothing witless or irrational, on the other hand, about the
attempt of the Vivaldi brothers, which can be considered as an expedition

1 Annali genovesi di Caffaro e dei suoi continuatori, a cura di C. Imperiale di
Sant’Angelo, Roma, 1929, V, p. 124.