Between Diary, Comedy, and Diplomatic Report. Writing in the Midst of the Italian Wars. Francesco Vettori's Viaggio in Alamagna, 1507-1515

Francesco Vettori was born in Florence in 1474 from Piero di Francesco Vettori and Caterina di Giovanni di Paolo Rucellai: his uncle Bernardo Rucellai married Nannina de’ Medici, Lorenzo the Magnificent’s sister, in 1466. Apart from holding a handful of minor offices in Florence and in the city’s contado, Francesco’s first relevant assignment was a mission to the Emperor Maximilian of Habsburg in 1507, where he was joined by Machiavelli in January 1508. Inspired by such mission, Vettori wrote his Viaggio in Alemagna, whose autograph manuscript is preserved at the Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana. Vettori became an important member of the Florentine political elites and was a skeptical but loyal supporter of his city until his death in 1539: best known as Machiavelli’s friend, and mainly for his correspondence with him (correspondence which gave to John Najemy the opportunity to write his masterful book, Between friends), he deserves attention on his own, as does his Viaggio. In his trademark elegant and nonchalant vernacular, Vettori himself in many passages of his work admits that the Viaggio is in fact many things at a time: an itinerary, a travel journal, a journal d’ambassade, a historical account of his times and of the uses, practices, and men of those times’ diplomacy, a narrative frame in which a constellation of short stories and novelle are collected and told with vivacity and brio.