This volume is the first integral transcription of the two original narratives (compiled in three manuscripts in Rome and Venice) of the 1431–32 misadventures of the Venetian noble Pietro Querini and his companions in Northern Europe. During a trade mission to Flanders, they lost their route and ship, were diverted to the west coast of Ireland, and, thanks to a lifeboat, ended up in a small village in the far Lofoten archipelago in Norway, inside the Arctic Circle. Many of Querini's companions died, but he and a few survivors lived in the village for three months, in spring 1431. They were eventually able to go back to Venice through Sweden, Denmark, London, and Continental Europe. Querini and two other survivors gave slightly different versions of their experience, partly because they had a different route and timing to reach home in the fall/winter of 1431–32: Querini eight months, the other two only five. The trip was vaguely known in the Renaissance but gained popularity after the edition of the manuscripts in the second volume of Giovan Battista Ramusio's Navigazioni e viaggi (1559). In recent times, French and Italian editions were published, but without maintaining the original form of the dialect and without offering the editorial care of Viella's edition. Querini's story is often recalled in Venice and the Veneto, particularly by the general public. In fact, he describes the stockfish found in Norway—called baccalà in the Veneto and today a famous local delicacy—for the first time in Venetian history, and so his adventure is considered the reason for the stockfish arriving in the lagoons.

The book has a general introduction by the historians Andrea Caracausi and Elena Svalduz, who provide a good picture of the late medieval trade network that Querini's team traveled—a wide and complex network in which the Venetians played a fundamental role. Then Angela Pluda offers a clear explanation of the features of her editing—from the criteria used to publish the sources to interesting linguistic inquiries—and of the contradictory facets of the publication by Ramusio, who intervened heavily on the two texts. Ramusio is called by Pluda an “able manipulator” (24), even though the second volume of the Navigazioni came out two years after his death.

Indeed, the two narratives present rich details that could be taken in many directions to understand travel, trade, and society in late medieval Scandinavia and Europe: details about the navigation and weather conditions at sea from the Irish west coast to the Norwegian upper north; about the presence of Venetians in Northern Europe (such as the intriguing figure of Zuan Franco in Stegeborg, Sweden); about the trade routes in Scandinavia; or about the key role that religion played in those lands—first, through people like the German Dominican who helped the Venetians during their stay in the Norwegian village, and second, through places such as the highly attended devotional sites of Saint Olav in Trondheim, Norway, and Saint Bridget of Vadstena, Sweden. These traces of local devotion might further lead to an anthropological use of the two sources, in particular because of fascinating pages devoted to the customs of the people of the Lofoten Islands and their cultural interaction with strangers from the Mediterranean. For instance, the description of the positive acceptance of Pietro Querini's kneeling in front of the wife of the local chief upon his arrival, or of the natural nudity of the villagers, might anticipate the myth of the noble savage in later European literature.

Unfortunately, the newly published sources do not help very much with Querini's hypothesis about the introduction of stockfish into Venice. Leaving the village, Querini received sixty “loads” of stockfish from the head of the village (59), but almost certainly none of them survived the long trip back home. Did Querini advise some of his merchant friends in Venice to look for stockfish in Northern markets? Was his handwritten travelogue read by someone before Ramusio and his team? Or were the other two survivors, who arrived in the lagoons three months before Querini, to play the major role in the local diffusion of the new delicacy? The mystery continues.