ABSTRACT
The tremendous intellectual development experienced by Italy at the end of the Middle Ages, which is sometimes known as humanism and sometimes as the Renaissance, was not slow to cross the Alps and to affect Danubian Europe. The route that it followed was curious, however; it first touched Hungary before it reached Vienna and the hereditary lands. The Holy Roman Empire experienced its own development for the great merchant cities of Upper Germany — Nürnberg and Augsburg - had direct economic and cultural contact with the great Italian cities, especially Venice, where German—Italian relations were given solid expression on the banks of the Rialto in the Fondaco dei Tedeschi.
