This ebook is headquartered at the Venetian humanist Pietro Bembo (1470-1547), on his two-year remain in Sicily in 1492-4 to review the traditional Greek language less than one in all its such a lot individual modern academics, the Byzantine émigré Constantine Lascaris, and peculiarly on his ascent of Mount Etna in 1493. The extra specific concentration of this research is at the ingenious capacities that crucially form Bembo's elegantly crafted account, in Latin, of his Etna experience in his so-called De Aetna, released on the Aldine press in Venice in 1496. This paintings is forged within the kind of a discussion that happens among the younger Bembo and his father Bernardo (himself a widespread Venetian statesman with robust humanist involvements) after Pietro's go back to Venice from Sicily in 1494. yet De Aetna offers even more than a one-dimensional account of the evidence, points of interest and findings of Pietro's climb. way more very important within the current research is his eye for artistic elaboration, or for reworking his literal adventure at the mountain right into a meditation on his coming-of-age at a eliminate from the normal career-path anticipated of 1 of his station in the Venetian patriciate. 3 together informing beneficial properties which are serious to the creative originality of De Aetna obtain exact therapy during this examine: (i) the stimulus that Pietro drew from the complicated heritage of Mount Etna as taken care of within the Greco-Roman literary culture from Pindar onwards; (ii) the notable novelty of De Aetna's prestige because the first Latin textual content produced on the nascent Aldine press within the prototype of what glossy typography is aware as Bembo typeface; and (iii) Pietro's creative deployment of Etna as a robust, multivalent image that concurrently displays the various characterizations of, and the generational ameliorations among, father and son during their dialogical exchanges inside of De Aetna.