Inventing America in Baroque Italy: Columbus, Vespucci, and "New World" Epic
A talk by Nathalie Hestor, University of Oregon
Monday, October 6, 2025
4:00-5:30 pm
Dartmouth Hall 104
Sponsored by the Italian Studies Working Group, Leslie Center for the Humanities
This presentation considers the complex and often ambiguous ways in which, at a time when most of the Italian peninsula was under Habsburg domination, seventeenth-century Italian poets represent Italy's role in the exploration and conquest of the Americas. Italian epic poetry about the Americas prompted intense debates in literary circles: about the relationship between history and poetry; about war, violence, and heroicism; and about the fundamental nature and characteristics of the epic hero. At stake in these works and the discussions that surrounded them were Italy's international prestige, the viability of its vernacular poetic tradition, and on a deeper level, Italy's fraught relationship to Spain and unclear place on the transatlantic stage in the seventeenth century. For these "American" poets, casting Columbus and Vespucci as epic heroes—navigators, evangelizers, or conquerors, depending on the text—represented a radically new direction in epic poetry and a claim for Italy's place in global modernity and in the European encounter with human diversity.