ABSTRACT
As Pietro Della Valle was reimmersing himself in Roman society after a twelve-year absence, another literary academician, Francesco Belli, was leaving the Venetian republic on a European tour. Belli (1577-1644), born in Arzignano in the province of Vicenza, accompanied Venetian ambassador Giorgio Zorzi’s delegation to the Netherlands and France before returning to Verona on his own in 1627. Five years later, in Venice in 1632, he published his Osservazioni nel viaggio. Belli, as did Della Valle, traveled to satisfy his own curiosity and was allowed to join the Venetian delegation without holding any official position.1 Unlike Della Valle, however, Belli traveled for a relatively short period of nine months along well-established European routes and almost exclusively in the company of other Venetians of a similar social class. Even when moving through war-torn lands, Belli appears confident under the umbrella of the Venetian group. Della Valle’s difficulties in travel, sense of isolation, tragedies in his personal life, and adaptations to a myriad of cultures have no equivalent in Belli’s account. These concrete differences, evident in the two texts in terms of length, content, and perspective, do not offset their powerful common thread: the dominating presence of Italian literary culture and baroque aesthetics in the representation of the journey, and the attention to the process and craft of writing travel.
