Pietro Bembo on Etna

This book is centered on the Venetian humanist Pietro Bembo (1470–1547), on his stay in Sicily in 1492–4 to study the ancient Greek language under the Byzantine émigré Constantine Lascaris, and above all on his ascent of Mount Etna in 1493. The more particular focus of this study is on the imaginative capacities that crucially shape Bembo’s elegantly crafted account, in Latin, of his Etna adventure in his so-called De Aetna, published at the Aldine Press in Venice in 1496. This work is cast in the form of a dialogue that takes place between the young Bembo and his father, Bernardo (himself a prominent Venetian statesman with strong humanist involvements), after Pietro’s return to Venice from Sicily in 1494. But De Aetna offers much more than a one-dimensional account of the facts, sights, and findings of Pietro’s climb. Three mutually informing features that are critical to the artistic originality of De Aetna receive detailed treatment in this study: (i) the stimulus that Pietro drew from the complex history of Mount Etna as treated in the Greco-Roman literary tradition from Pindar onward; (ii) the striking novelty of De Aetna’s status as the first Latin text produced at the nascent Aldine Press in the prototype of what modern typography knows as Bembo typeface; and (iii) Pietro’s ingenious deployment of Etna as a powerful, multivalent symbol that simultaneously reflects the diverse characterizations of, and the generational differences between, father and son in the course of their dialogical exchanges within De Aetna.