Viaggi, racconti, archivi. Notizie di esplorazione e scoperta, in I Gonzaga tra Oriente e Occidente. Viaggi, scoperte geografiche e meraviglie esotiche

Since the days of the Historical School, the Gonzaga Archives have been a favorite hunting ground for scholars in the history of geographical exploration. Indeed, the dense information network of the court, hooked almost everywhere in Italy and Europe, collected news to satisfy the lords' curiosity, but also to keep them informed about the changing coordinates of political and economic balances. The reports came in different forms, and very often by indirect means. All of this has not escaped the notice of historians and, above all, the compilers of modern source collections, from Guglielmo Berchet to Alessandro Luzio, but the richness and heterogeneity of the preserved materials can still be useful to better understand the attention Renaissance observers turned to all the distant worlds. The various types of documents preserved in the Archives can initiate an analysis of travel texts on a broader scale.