Pietro Bembo, who has recently come to be considered the “fourth crown” (Giuseppe Patota, La quarta corona: Pietro Bembo e la codificazione dell’italiano scritto [2017]), is experiencing an era of remarkable editorial splendor. Over the past few years, studies, translations, entire conference panels (such as at the RSA in 2015), and exhibitions have proliferated, attracting exceptional editorial and academic attention to the figure of one of the most important humanists of the European Renaissance. In Padua, for example, Pietro Bembo e l’invenzione del Rinascimento was quite an event and gathered more than a few treasures from Bembo’s private collection.

This fever for the Venetian humanist is confirmed once again by these two works, which since their appearance and through their own merits have become fundamental to understanding Bembo’s life and work. They supplement efforts by Susan Nalezyty (Pietro Bembo and the Intellectual Pleasures of a Renaissance Writer and Art Collector [2017]), Luca Marcozzi (Bembo [2017]), and my humble contributions: the first translations into Spanish of the Latin correspondence between Bembo and Gianfrancesco Pico (De Imitatione: Sobre la imitación [2017]) and the Prose della volgar lingua, which I edited a few years ago (Prosas de la lengua vulgar [2011]), together with Bembo’s translation of Gorgias’s Encomium of Helen (in Lectura y Signo 2 [2007]: 63–88).

Faini’s and Williams’s books are true songs to the beauty of the Renaissance and also to philology. Carefully executed, these two works are precious for the high-quality images they contain, and at the same time essential for the intellectual world that loves humanism. Faini’s work is a biography of literary merit that places it in the wake of Carol Kidwell (Pietro Bembo: Lover, Linguist, Cardinal [2004]) and the older but exceptional novel by Gildo Meneghetti (La vita avventurosa di Pietro Bembo, Umanista-poeta-cortegiano [1961]). Faini seeks to bring to a nonspecialized audience some of the most striking events of the Venetian’s life. These episodes range from the fight against several members of the Goro family that cost Bembo a hand wound, to the agitated life in the court of the queen of Cyprus; from the frequent trips from one end of Italy to the other, to the establishment of a literary and intellectual reference in Rome; from the scandalous romances, to the fulfillment of the long-awaited goal of becoming cardinal. All this complements a bibliographic journey that is the true axis of the work. Faini contextualizes every relevant event in the life of the Venetian within his works: from the editions of Dante and Petrarca with Aldo Manuzio to the courtly poems; from the dialogue enclosed in the ascension to the volcano Etna to the Neoplatonism in Gli Asolani; from the collaborations in Lascaris’s Greek dictionary to the Prose della volgar lingua. The result is a body of the fundamental works of the Italian Renaissance, contextualized by Faini in a lively journey that makes them not only much more comprehensible and thrilling, but also closer to an author’s human warmth, so often lost in research.

Williams’s edition, on the other hand, delivers an English translation of the De Aetna dialogue, in which a younger Bembo tells of his ascension to the volcano with his father, the famous Bernardo Bembo, during his stay in Sicily (1492–94). Bembo on Etna is a careful translation of the dialogue, preceded by a significant introduction that intelligently follows the key points of humanism and Bembo’s biography. Combined with an extensive bibliography, these elements together make for a deeper understanding of this youthful dialogue. Williams goes beyond the text itself and endeavors to consider fundamental aspects of how Etna has been treated since ancient times. He adds elements of landscaping and art collecting to give a bigger picture of the text and its circumstances. As the author says in the preface: “This study aims to contribute what it can to modern scholarship on Pietro Bembo … by exploring the contextual background and the imaginative capacities that crucially shape his portrayal of his youthful ascent” (xiii). However, Williams goes much further, devoting an in-depth look at apparently secondary themes in short chapters, for example when he discusses whether Bembo’s translation of Gorgias’s In Helenam Laudatio was the same one that Aldus Manutius included in the Pars Tertia of the 1513 anthology of Rhetorum Graecorum Orationes. Treating minor themes as satellites tied to a greater purpose allows a better perspective of the multidimensional personality of Bembo’s life and work.

In sum, both works are anchored in scholarly authority and have been masterfully argued with extraordinary sagacity. And both display a captivating prose style. In conclusion, both books are essential for those who love the Italian Renaissance and want to know more about one of its fundamental figures. Pietro Bembo was among the few who did most to transform the limited world of the Middle Ages into the flourishing Renaissance that became, through its own merit, the cradle of our modern world.