Pietro Della Valle: Christian pilgrimage, antiquarianism and cosmopolitanism in the age of the Baroque

Abstract

The Roman aristocrat Pietro Della Valle, who defined himself as a pilgrim and as a citizen of the world, can stand as a paradigmatic case of the emergence of the modern curious traveller out of a religious tradition of pilgrimage. Della Valle did indeed travel to the Holy Land as a pious Catholic, in the second decade of the seventeenth century. However, his pilgrimage was from the start conditioned by antiquarian and romantic concerns, and he eventually extended his journey beyond Ottoman lands towards Persia and India. This article will elucidate how the pilgrim fashioned and transformed himself around a multi-faceted idea of travel in his letters at different stages of his journey, and as a member of a learned academy upon his return to Italy. Looking back at his visit to the Holy Land as part of a project of aristocratic self-fashioning, it will argue that the transformation of a religious pilgrimage into a complex experience involving religious and political schemes, scientific erudition and love did not open a chasm between piety and worldly learning, but instead widened the scope of curiosity in more exotic and cosmopolitan directions. The case of Della Valle exemplifies how early modern European Christian identities, in this respect often at odds with late antique and early medieval antecedents, were frequently built around the idea that religion and knowledge of the world were largely complementary, in a manner that facilitated new attitudes of cultural accommodation that placed increasing emphasis on the universality of learned civility over strictly religious experiences.