The Travels and Journal of Ambrosio Bembo (review)

Clara Bargellini and Anthony Welch have provided early modernists with a rich scholarly resource: an annotated and illustrated translation of Ambrosio Bembo’s Travels and Journal through Part of Asia. Ambrosio Bembo was a Venetian noble from the same illustrious family line as Pietro Bembo. At age seventeen, he worked as a steersman on a galley in the last year of the War of Candia before undertaking a journey to the Middle East and India. His account of this voyage is a colorful and fascinating travelogue in the tradition of Herodotus and Marco Polo.

In this manuscript, Bembo describes his four-year voyage. He left from Venice in 1671 and his travels took him to Aleppo, overland to Baghdad, southeast along the Tigris River to Basra, and then by ship to Goa. On his return trip, he traveled back through the heart of the Safavi Empire and its capital Isfahan in Iran. His manuscript was illustrated by a French artist named G. J. Grélot, who traveled home with Bembo from Iran to Venice. He arrived back in 1675, relieved to see the Campanile of San Marco again at the tender age of twenty-three. According to the editors, “his observations on Iran and the Iranians are among the most interesting and important in his book” (7).

Along his way, Bembo described a great variety of things: shipbuilding, landscape, cities, architecture, food, governments, coinage, social structures, costumes, and weather. Perhaps the best way to get a feeling for his account is simply to offer a sense of his commentary. On leaving the city of Lar in southern Iran, Bembo noted the tombs of the Persians: “They are similar to those of the Europeans of Aleppo. In addition, they have decorations and intaglio with colors and gold. There is a hole in the middle of the stone where they put food for the dead” (294). In the city of Shiraz, he observed how “some young men send verses to the women they love. As a sign of love, they say they are wounded, and they receive from their ladies cloths to heal the wounds.” In this city, “the best organized [of the bazaars] was the bazaar of sweets. They make many of these, and they are of good quality, the equal of our Italian ones. . . . The bread is rather good and white. They make it in large flat cakes with fennel. The wine is the best in all of Persia” (301–02). Although Bembo asserted that Muslims followed a “false prophet,” he was clearly fascinated by Islam and by the great diversity of the world outside of Venice, so much so that he clearly emulated and participated in many local customs and traditions during his travels. Like Marco Polo, he noted that upon his return, “few recognized me at first because of my long beard and my Turkish clothing” (421).

Neither in their introduction nor in their annotated notes do the authors take any notice of the vast and growing theoretical literature on the subject of travel and ethnography in the early modern world. Scholars such as Stephen Greenblatt, Stuart Schwartz, and Joan-Pau Rubies, for instance, have considered what early modern travel tells us about representation, self, and other. Since Bembo clearly saw the world of the East through Venetian eyes, the ideas of these and other scholars would have much to say about Bembo’s account. However, it is likely that the editors of this volume wished to present it simply and directly — unfettered by theoretical interpretation — for use as a resource for scholarship and teaching.

After working closely with Bembo’s volume, the editors have clearly come to like and respect their author, who they claim was “a remarkably open-minded and decent person” who was “aware that his own cultural and religious background was not necessarily the only valid one” (22–23). Bembo’s voice from...