An evening with journalist and author Andrea di Robilant.

Andrea di Robilant is an AUR professor, a journalist, and an author who divides his time between Rome and Venice.

Born and raised in Italy, he studied history and politics at Columbia University and spent many years in the United States as a correspondent for the Italian dailies La Repubblica and La Stampa. He is a prolific author whose works include 

• A Venetian Affair, a New York Times “notable book of the year” in 2003, set in eighteenth-century Venice 
• Lucia: A Venetian Life in the Age of Napoleon, a widely praised biography of the author’s ancestor, Lucia Mocenigo 
• Autumn in Venice: Ernest Hemingway and His Last Muse, an intimate look at Hemingway's final years. The story of writer and muse, which also examines the cost to a young woman of her association with a larger-than-life literary celebrity.
• Chasing the Rose: An Adventure in the Venetian Country, the charming chronicle of di Robilanrt's search for the identity of a mysterious old rose. A tale that takes us back to the time of Josephine Bonaparte, as well as into some of the most delightful rose gardens in Italy.
• Irresistible North: From Venice to Greenland on the Trail of the Zen Brothers, a delightful odyssey in the path of the mysterious Zen brothers, who explored parts of the New World a century before Columbus and became both a source of scandal and a cause célèbre among geographers in the following centuries.

In 2024, di Robilant published his latest book - “A narrative of novelistic resonance . . . Astonishing”: The Washington Post - This Earthly Globe, the story of an Italian Renaissance book editor who introduced European minds to the wider world through his passion for geography.

In the autumn of 1550, a thick volume containing a wealth of geographical information new to Europeans, with startling wood-cut maps of Africa, India and Indonesia, was published in Venice under the title Navigationi et Viaggi (Journeys and Navigations). The editor of this remarkable collection of travelogues, journals and classified government reports remained anonymous. Two additional volumes delivered the most accurate information on Asia and the “New World” available at the time. The three volumes together constituted an unparalleled release of geographical data into the public domain. It was, Andrea di Robilant writes, the biggest Wikileak of the Renaissance.

In This Earthly Globe, di Robilant brings to life the palace intrigues, editorial wheedling, delicate alliances and vibrant curiosity that resulted in this coup by the editor Giovambattista Ramusio. Learned and self-effacing, he gathered a vast array of both popular and closely guarded narratives, from the journals of Marco Polo (he fact-checked them!) to detailed reports on Northern African cultures from the Muslim scholar and diplomat al-Hasan ibn Mohammad al-Wazzan (later known as Leo Africanus). Diverse voices spill out from these chapters as di Robilant recounts how Ramusio pursued the sources, and how he understood both the darker episodes of “exploration” involving colonial violence and the voyage stories which included accounts of people from African and Asian lands, who had a great deal to share about their cultures. The result is a far-flung and delightful homage to one of the founding fathers of modern geography.

Join faculty and students of The American University of Rome for an evening with Andrea di Robilant as he discusses his latest publication and his life and writings to date.

This event will be held at Centro Studi Americani (via Michelangelo Caetani, 32 – 00186 Roma) on Tuesday, November 5th, at 18:30, on the eve of the United States election.