A great liar, a pirate, a raving visionary in the grip of ecstasy, a sailor who has seen everything and is capable of anything: Christopher Columbus is the Admiral, a colossal and contested historical figure\u2014hero of exploration and initiator of colonial oppression, bearer of European civilization to the Americas and, at the same time, the one who set a genocide in motion, sanctioning imperialism and cultural suppression.\nIn this novel, Giosu\u00e8 Calaciura recounts the organization of the voyage to the Indies, the ferocity of the conquest, technology as a tool of domination, slavery, and violence as the exclusive and ultimate instrument governing the West\u2019s relationship with the \u201cothers,\u201d whether Indigenous peoples or non-elite Europeans. Fidelity to the facts and to Columbian chronicles\u2014grounded in the logbook and reinforced by the records of Columbus\u2019s trial conducted by the royal inquisitor Francisco de Bobadilla\u2014is interwoven with literary, evangelical, and fantastical elements that shape, distort, and enliven historical reality, making the deeper truth of those deeds shine through. Thus the crossing becomes epic, daring, reckless, driven by the Admiral\u2019s fevered imagination\u2014a kind of oceanic Don Quixote, stuffed with too many readings, magico-religious practices, hypotheses, and unverified conjectures. A mad adventure that built a world of the unhinged.\nThe conquest of the Indies remains a kind of ever-updated \u201cmanual\u201d of contemporary violence, of the loss of any sense of justice and compassion; it is the prototype of the enduring arrogance that governs relations between rich and poor countries, between the wealthy and the dispossessed. The Admiral is also a novel about illusions\u2014the hope for a better world for all, which shatters at every landing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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Un gran bugiardo, un pirata, un vaneggiatore in preda all\u2019estasi, un marinaio che tutto ha visto, e di tutto \u00e8 capace: Cristoforo Colombo \u00e8 l\u2019Ammiraglio, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":1586,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1579","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-libri"],"meta_box":{"seleziona_logo":"Standard","colore":"Prefedinito","autore":"Giosu\u00e8 Calaciura","citazione":"","titolo_2":"","releasedate":"","publisher":"","pages":"","translation_rights_sold_to":"","group_info_progetto":[],"immagini":[],"galleria_video":[],"autori-libri_to":["339"]},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/alferj.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1579","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/alferj.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/alferj.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alferj.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alferj.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1579"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/alferj.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1579\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1580,"href":"https:\/\/alferj.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1579\/revisions\/1580"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alferj.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1586"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/alferj.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1579"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alferj.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1579"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alferj.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1579"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}