From Memory to Modernity

Chapter 2 builds on the mnemonic significance of the Etna Idea as traced in Chapter 1, partly by relating Pietro Bembo’s activation of literary memory on Etna to the Classical phenomenon of mnemonic topography, or the embedding of the socio-historical, cultural, and literary past into descriptions of material landscape. De Aetna is also viewed in Chapter 2 in relation to the Renaissance tradition of travel writings that combined topographical surveillance with the visitation of antiquity in merging past and present, or in connecting place description with antiquarian recovery. A further memory function of De Aetna lies in its possible dialogue with, and even its direct response to, Petrarch’s celebrated account of his ascent of Mont Ventoux in 1336. The chapter duly visits that account, but as part of a larger attempt to locate Pietro’s Etna adventure within the broader history of mountaineering and the mixed attitudes to mountains from antiquity to the sixteenth century.

Adventure · Art · Art history · Epistemology · Linguistics · Literature · Mnemonic · Modernity · Phenomenon · Relation (database) · The Renaissance · History · Philippine History and Culture · Philosophy · 1470-1547 · Bembo, pietro · Criticism and interpretation · De Aetna (Bembo, Pietro) · description and travel · Etna, mount (italy) · Greek language, study and teaching · Italy · Sicily