I remember my grandmother talking about the illustrious ancestors in our family. One of them was Ugolino Vivaldi, who sailed out of Genoa in May 1291 with two galleys, meaning to reach the Indies by sea, the first such voyage anyone recorded.
I have been fascinated by his story ever since, and I finally decided to explore it in depth. I did not go to him looking for someone to admire. I went the way anyone goes to a story with a gap in it, out of curiosity, and I wrote this book because I wanted to tell that story.
Alessandro
Historical fiction · The Ocean Sea, Book 1
The Western Passage
The idea was right. The ship was wrong.
Genoa, 1291. Everything the Indies produce comes west through a chain of hands, and every hand takes its cut. Ugolino Vivaldi, a merchant who can read the weight of a cargo from the way the porters carry it, means to go round the chain by sea: out through the Strait, down the coast of Africa, and the first hull in pays nothing to anybody.
He is given two galleys, the best ships Genoa builds: fast, free of the wind, able to put their bows on any beach. But each carries a hundred and fifty men pulling oars under a southern sun, more mouths than any galley can keep in water. Every few days she must put in to fill her casks, while the coast keeps running south.
The annal of Genoa follows them as far as a cape called Gozora.
The ship's books go on.
A novel of the Genoese voyage of 1291, told through the books kept aboard.
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The Western Passage is the novel of the Vivaldi voyage, which left Genoa in May 1291 to reach the Indies by sea, and the first book of The Ocean Sea. The novels of the series follow the Vivaldi family across different centuries, with the shadow of Ugolino over every one of them. It is available now in paperback and as a Kindle ebook, in English and in Italian as Il passaggio a ponente.