Verrazano, Giovanni

VERRAZANO, GIOVANNI. - Florentine navigator, b. around 1485 to a family originally from the Val di Greve; killed in an expedition in 1528.

Nothing is known of his youth, except that, having devoted himself very early to travel, he had long resided in Cairo and in other places of the Levant. At least from 1522 he was settled in France, and in 1524 he carried out, on behalf of King Francis I, a memorable expedition along the coasts of North America, concerning which — other documents having been lost — there survives an important letter-report from the navigator to the Sovereign, a copy of which was also sent to a Florentine merchant settled in Lyon and by him forwarded to Florence. The purpose of the expedition was to find a passage to reach Cathay, that is, northern China, by a route shorter than the one, by then found to be enormously long, traveled by Magellan across the Pacific.

Of the four ships that were to make up the expedition, only one remained, the Delfina, which set out secretly from a deserted rock near Madeira on 17 January 1524, and, having reached the coasts of present-day Carolina on 7 March, after a brief push southward, sailed back up the entire coastline as far as Cape Breton, penetrating into the numerous jagged inlets and making frequent stops (among others in New York Bay, of which we have the first exact description). During the long voyage it was even believed that the passage toward the west had been glimpsed in the lagoon region known today as Pamlico Sound: here in fact certain charts, which together with the aforementioned report constitute our only authentic sources, hypothetically depict a strait. The Delfina was back in France, at Dieppe, in the first days of July 1524. Verrazano's voyage provided the definitive demonstration that the lands discovered beyond the Atlantic constituted a single mass, from the Arctic Circle to the Strait of Magellan, completely isolated from the Old Continent; hence its exceptional importance.

Verrazano also captained a second oceanic expedition that set out in 1528, about which, however, very little is known. It seems that it was bound for the Caribbean Sea and Darien, and that Verrazano met his death there on an unidentifiable little island, massacred and devoured by the natives. The horrible scene was supposedly witnessed from afar by his brother Gerolamo, himself also a navigator and cartographer, author, among other things, of a great planisphere on which his brother's discoveries are represented (Vatican Apostolic Library).

Roberto Almagia