490 edward muir
from an objective observer if there ever is such a person. Self-absorbed
and ambitious, intensely conservative and respectful of authority, Sanudo
was a Venetian insider who often felt like an outsider, someone mis-
treated by fortune and by the failure of others to recognized his merits.
however, because he was more a collector of other people’s information
than an original thinker or creative author, he provides an irreplaceable
window into the multiple dimensions of meaning in late 15th- and early
16th-century Venice.
long before he began his diaries, Marin accompanied in 1483 his uncle
Marco and two other patricians, who were serving as auditori nuovi to
hear appeals to sentences delivered by local judges, on a six-month jour-
ney throughout the Venetian mainland and istria. The seventeen-year-old
Marin kept an account of what he saw, revealing an obsession with details
that later made his famous 58-volume diary a kind of renaissance eth-
nography. he cultivated the traveler’s eye and played the politician in the
making that he was. As he visited each town, Marin checked off a list of
distinctive traits, describing the fortifications, walls, gates, markets, rivers,
and churches. he discussed the regular fairs, navigability of water courses,
damages inflicted by Turkish raids, patron saints, and miracle working
images. he listed the salaries and responsibilities of the governors, rettori,
capitani, and podestà. he picked up a little local history and, consistent
with the priorities of his humanist education, dutifully transcribed every
latin inscription he found.9
The Friulan “Other”for each town he noted the jurisdictional complexities of the place
because jurisdictions constituted the real presence of Venetian author-
ity within the terraferma dominion. The most idiosyncratic culture Marin
encountered was in friuli, the least urbanized region in the Venetian
dominion, indeed in northern italy. To the Venetians, the friulans were
inscrutable and hostile to strangers because of recurrent invasions and
incessant feuds. An impoverished, arid region divided into rugged Alps
and a broad malarial plain, friuli was inhabited by a people who practiced
Excelentissima: Selections from the Renaissance Diaries of Marin Sanudo (Baltimore, 2008),
pp. xx–xxi.
9 Marino Sanuto, Itinerario per la Terraferma veneziana nell’anno MCCCCLXXXIII
(padua, 1847).