Cità Excelentissima

Cità Excelentissima: Selections from the Renaissance Diaries of Marin Sanudo . Edited by Patricia H. Labalme and Laura Sanguineti White . Translated by Linda L. Carroll . Johns Hopkins University Press . 2008 . xlii + 598 pp. £33.50 . It would be practically impossible to exaggerate the importance of the diaries of Marin Sanudo (1466–1536) as a source for the history of Venice during the Renaissance. A patrician and scholar, Sanudo also held various political offices through three of the most tumultuous decades of Venice's history, recording practically all he heard in the fifty-eight manuscript volumes of his diary, covering a period of nearly forty years. While Sanudo always considered his diaries a potentially public work, and while he was in a position to glean an unusually rich and variegated array of information regarding the political workings of the republic, his diaries are definitely not limited to the life of the government. They span all aspects of Venetian life. When he began keeping the diaries, in January 1496, he had already written a history of the French invasion of Italy in 1494, Charles VIII's attempt to secure the Kingdom of Naples. It soon became clear, though, that the initial invasion was but the beginning of a series of wars that would transform Italy, and Sanudo began the diaries as a record of events to be reduced to a polished version once peace had returned to the peninsula. It is posterity's great fortune that Sanudo was not allowed to become Renaissance Italy's Thucydides, for much of the wealth of information regarding the economic and social life of the city, not to mention its religious beliefs, practices and superstitions, or its intellectual and cultural vitality would inevitably have been lost. For it is both the immediacy of the daily account and Sanudo's unbounded fascination with life that make the diaries the precious source they are. This extensive collection of excerpts is eminently successful in achieving the editors' stated goal of making Sanudo's diaries more accessible to a broader audience. The diary entries are organized thematically rather than chronologically, grouped into sections, the first concerning Sanudo himself, followed by three sections related to the political life of the state: the Venetian government, crime and the judiciary, war and diplomacy. These are followed by sections pertaining to the economic life of Venice and the early modern world, Venetian society and social life, religion and superstition. The final two sections deal with cultural life: humanism, education and the arts; and the loosely organized ‘Theater in Venice, Venice as Theater’ regarding the theatricality of life as well as theatrical representations themselves. Each entry is preceded by a brief introductory paragraph contextualizing the excerpt and the entire volume is completed by appendices dedicated to money and wages, and to the technical vocabulary and terms employed by Sanudo himself. Reducing fifty-eight volumes of manuscript diaries to a single volume is an undertaking fraught with perils. Given the breadth of topics canvassed by the author, striking a balance between range and depth is a difficult task indeed, but one at which the editors succeed handily. Some scholars would perhaps have preferred a chronological organization in order to facilitate research, but we must remember that in spite of this volume's 600 pages, it presents only a sampling of the original manuscripts. As such it provides a tantalizing window onto the world of Marin Sanudo, the world of one of early modern Europe's most brilliant cities

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