ABSTRACT
In August 1446, the Genoese aristocracy welcomed the arrival of Cyriac of Ancona. Cyriac is well aware of the city of Genoa: he was there several times during his life and, mainly, he was very familiar with a lot of Genoese aristocrats living in the East, in Aegean and Black Sea colonies. In the Eastern Empire, he acted as a very careful political mediator and acknowledged connoisseur of the antique. Due to his knowledge and to his love for the witnesses of Classical Greece, he firmly and openly invited the local sultan to preserve as a memory of a greatest past the ruins of Cyzicus temple, and a few years later he followed Rodi’s Knight to see the “Mausoleo di Alicarnasso”, becoming the last fortress to avoid Turks invasion. The author explores this “neutral” role during a period often described by scholars as clearly divided between east and west, that offers the unique opportunity to try to read the knowledge inherited from the east into the “creation” of the Italian Renaissance language, in art and culture in general.
