Solvitur ambulando: Walking, Seeing, and Understanding

• In Event: The Mechanics of Mobility in the Renaissance World II: Sites of Movement

Abstract

Benedetto Dei’s 15th-century writings are filled with descriptions of places that vividly express his itineraries through both his city and the Mediterranean. In one context he traces the contours of his own neighborhood, street by street. In another he describes his journeys to the limits of the Mediterranean world. In doing so he expresses a conception of his multiple relationships to the world as a function of his movement through it. Other Renaissance writers also describe both familiar and strange places as an effect of walking between, around, and through them. Scaling up and down from the micro to the macro, from neighborhood to territory, provided a way for Renaissance travelers to come to terms with and compare the worlds in which they lived, and it is precisely the mobility of such viewing that allows and defines this dynamic way of understanding the intersections of natural and the built environment.

Author

• Niall Atkinson, University of Chicago