The early 16th century was a trying time to be a Venetian. La Serenissima’s glory days of dominating the Silk Road were long over. Since a French army had steamrollered through in 1508, its Italian mainland empire was slipping away too. It was an even more trying time to be a geographer. The cascade of discoveries that came in the wake of Columbus’s encounter with the Americas in 1492 overturned centuries-old beliefs about the way the world was ordered, not so much filling in blanks on the map as adding wholly new sections to it.

At the centre of these twin anxieties was the Venetian geographer Giovambattista Ramusio, whose career as a civil servant, book publisher and clandestine manuscript collector Andrea di Robilant has triumphantly excavated. The bare biographical details of that career are impressive enough: secretary to the Venetian Senate at the age of thirty, Ramusio climbed four decades later to the bureaucratic summit, becoming secretary-general to Venice’s secretive Council of Ten. Tellingly, only one image of Ramusio survives, an 18th-century etching, and the sole known painting featuring him perished in a fire in 1577. On the face of it, the life of Ramusio’s younger brother Girolamo is more interesting. A talented poet who fled to Syria after a scandal involving his high-born Paduan lover, he translated the medieval Arabic scholar Avicenna’s Canon of Medicine, and died after gorging himself on apricots. 

It is on Ramusio’s three-volume, two-million-word Navigationi et Viaggi, a compendium of everything that could reasonably be known about the expanding world, that his fame rests. This heroic enterprise is the subject of di Robilant’s book, which also takes in the network of friends and contacts that enabled it