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Serialised book readings, featuring works of non-fiction, biography, autobiography, travel, diaries, essays, humour and history

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Book of the Week: Venetian Navigators - The Voyages of the Zen Brothers to the Far North

Book of the Week: Venetian Navigators - The Voyages of the Zen Brothers to the Far North: Episode 1

Factual: History

Factual: Travel

Venetian Navigators - The Voyages of the Zen Brothers to the Far North

Episode 1

BBC Radio 4 - Book of the Week, Venetian Navigators - The Voyages of the Zen Brothers to the Far North, Episode 1

A quest for traces of the fabled North Atlantic voyages of two 14th century merchants.

A quest for traces of the fabled voyages of two Venetian merchants, whose 14th century travels were recorded by an enthusiastic, if unreliable, ancestor. The reader is Sam Dale.

By Andrea di Robilant.


Read by Sam Dale.


In the fourteenth century, so the story goes, two merchant brothers set out from Venice on a journey through the rough seas of the North Atlantic, encountering warrior princes, fighting savage natives and, just possibly, reaching the New World a full century before Columbus. 


The story of their adventure, recounted in a small book accompanied by a beautifully detailed map by an enthusiastic Zen ancestor in 1558, travelled throughout Europe, from the workshop of the great cartographer Gerard Mercator to the court of Elizabeth I. For centuries, the brothers were heralded as pioneering adventurers, until, in 1835, the story was denounced as a 'tissue of lies' and the Zens faded into oblivion.


Intrigued by the myth, the writer Andrea di Robilant set out to discover the truth about the Zen voyages. Following in their footsteps, his quest to solve one of Venice's most intriguing mysteries takes him on a fascinating journey of his own, from the crumbling Palazzo Zen in Venice to the space-age transport links of the Faroe Islands, a remote volcanic hillside in Greenland and the ruins of a once dynamic monastery in Iceland. 


Abridged by Laurence Wareing.


Produced by Kirsteen Cameron.

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The quest to discover the truth about two Venetian merchants' 14th century travels

Andrea di Robilant's quest for traces of the fabled voyages of two Venetian merchants in the 14th century

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Venetian Navigators - The Voyages of the Zen Brothers to the Far North

Episode 1

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