«Reverendo signore mio»

The essay investigates G.B. Ramusio’s language in his letters to Pietro Bembo (1537-38) preserved in the Ms. Ambrosianus D 335 inf. and recently published by A. Del Ben. This corpus is the largest known amount of autograph texts written by the Venetian official and gives a rare insight into the tangled web of correspondents and into the fast communication links that lead to Venice from various sources. Compared to Ramusio’s dissertations and introductions to the exploration accounts published in the first volume of his Navigationi et viaggi (editio princeps 1550), these texts are quite more colloquial: the linguistic analysis shows all the features of a lower register and lets many local words and phrasemes appear to the surface of the page.