Usuari:Mcapdevila/vespucci
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Amerigo Vespucci (pronunciació italiana: [ameˈriɡo vesˈputtʃi]) (Florence, March 9, 1454 – Seville, February 22, 1512)(NOTE 1) was an Italian explorer, merchant, navigator and cartographer, originally from Florence. He was the first piloto-mayor ("chief navigator") of Spain, from 1508 until his death in 1512.
Statue outside the Uffizi, Florence. | |
Biografia | |
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Naixement | 9 de març de 1454 Florence, Republic of Florence, in present-day Italy |
Mort | 22 de febrer de 1512(1512-02-22) (als 57 anys) Seville, Crown of Castile, in present-day Spain |
Dades personals | |
Altres noms | Américo Vespucio [es] Americus Vesputius [la] Américo Vespúcio [pt] Alberigo Vespucci |
Nacionalitat | Italian, Florentine |
Es coneix per | Demonstrating that the New World was not Asia but a previously-unknown fourth continent.[a] |
Activitat | |
Ocupació | Merchant, Explorer, Cartographer |
Vespucci is credited as the author of a series of famous letters (written 1500-1505) describing four journeys he undertook to the Americas between 1496 and 1504 – two for the Crown of Castile, two for the Kingdom of Portugal. However, the veracity and authenticity of these letters, and the journeys they describe, has been doubted, and become an object of contention and controversy among historians for centuries. If true, the letters suggest Vespucci may very well have discovered the American mainland in 1497, before Christopher Columbus, and may have extensively explored the coasts of Central and North America several years before they were reached by any other known explorer of that age.
Two of Vespucci's letters, Mundus Novus (1504) and Letter to Soderini (1505), were a publishing sensation at the time, reprinted repeatedly throughout Europe in a few short years. Amerigo Vespucci was probably the first to unambiguously articulate the hypothesis that the lands discovered by European navigators to the west were not the edges of Asia, but an entirely new continent, a "New World" (Mundus Novus).
The Americas are generally believed to have derived their name from the feminized Latin version of his first name.[1] The term "America" made its first known appearance on a famous map by Martin Waldseemüller to accompany a 1507 edition of Vespucci's letters.[2]