The frontispiece of the 1590 edition of the Gerusalemme Liberata-the third and at that point, the most sumptuous edition of Torquato Tasso's epic poem-is a portrait of the harbor of Genoa and just above it, a picture of Tasso himself, wreathed in the laurel crown that makes him an heir to Petrarch and others. The poet is looking out from the harbor into the great West beyond, an odd posture given the poem's virtually exclusive focus on the First Crusade to the East. This becomes less perplexing when we consider that this edition was printed in Genoa, but the puzzle only disappears when turning to two stanzas in Canto 15. There, through the mouthpiece of Fortuna, Tasso praises the Genoese sailor Columbus, who will sail into the unknown West some four centuries after the First Crusade: A man
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