The Venetian Qur'an is a translation from Italian of L'Alcorano di Macometto: Storia di un libro del Cinquecento europeo, published by Il Mulino in 2013. It is a very well-threaded collection of essays dealing with a 1547 Italian abridged translation of the Qur'an developed using a Latin version. Tommasino has organized the results of his research into ten chapters. The first chapter addresses critiques offered by proto-Orientalist scholars of the period of a work misleadingly presented as a translation from the original Arabic: it was clear from a glance that the Italian version was developed on the basis of a Latin translation. Translated by Giovanni Battista Castrodardo and published by Andrea Arrivabene, Alcorano di Macometto was discarded and derided by Arabists and proto-Orientalists of early modern Europe; a similar rejection of the work can still be found in some of the recent bibliography. Nevertheless, Tommasino convincingly argues that deep and attentive study of this text and the circumstances of its production reveals a rich source of information about the Venetian milieu, hitherto overlooked by scholars. Having used the first chapter as a kind of raison d’être for his study, Tommasino moves on to describe material aspects of the text, further explored in the appendix. Chapter 3, “‘What Everybody Wishes for and Keeps Silent’: Analysis of the Context Through the Paratext,” links Arrivabene's publication to the figure of French ambassador Gabriel d'Aramon, who was sent on a mission to persuade Suleyman to attack the Habsburg forces in both Hungary and the Mediterranean. In this chapter, Tommasino argues that the publisher concealed a subversive political message in the dedicatory letter that precedes the translation.

Chapter 4 is dedicated to the biography and literary legacy of Giovanni Battista Castrodardo, the translator of Bibliander's edition of Robert of Ketton's Latin Qur'an into Italian. Castrodardo was a churchman, a translator of history books, and a commentator of Dante. He enjoyed a prolific literary career during a five-year period (1543–48) and became mysteriously silent from the publication of Alcorano di Macometto until his death ca. 1588. The following chapter explores facets of Castrodardo as a Dante scholar by analyzing how he interpreted the episodes of the purification of Muhammad's heart and the Prophet's Night Journey (al-’Isrā’ wal-Mi'rāj). Tommasino detects and describes therein Dantesque vocabulary and phrasing. Chapter 6, “The Religion of the Italians, or Purgatory and the Qur'an: A Belief and a Place Between Robert of Ketton and Roberto Bellarmino,” is of particular interest. In this chapter we learn how the text of the Muslim holy book was manipulated and deformed in order to confirm the existence of the “third space,” the purgatory, in accordance with Catholic dogma. Conversely, chapter 7 offers a political reading of a part of Castrodardo's rendition of the biography of Muhammad. The close reading of the oration by Muhammad's mentor, the monk Sergius, reveals deep Machiavellian undertones. The final three chapters narrate the stories of the readers of the Alcorano di Macometto. The most striking cases are probably those of the prophet Scolio and the miller Menocchio, studied by Carlo Ginzburg (The Cheese and the Worms [1976]), and revisited by Tommasino in chapter 9.

In sum, The Venetian Qur'an is an inspiring example of how to conduct research on a seventeenth-century book. Alcorano di Macometto is studied from various angles and using different methods and disciplinary approaches, as the author himself admits (23). I have encountered a couple of slips, perhaps inevitable in a project that covers such a range of fields and immense secondary bibliography. First, Egidio da Viterbo (quoted in this study as Giles of Viterbo) did not translate the Qur'an (125, 126); rather he commissioned its translation to two different converts from Islam. Second, according to the most recent studies (García-Arenal and Starczewska; García-Arenal, Szpiech, and Starczewska), Juan Martín de Figuerola probably did not know Arabic but relied on Arabic-speaking intermediaries. Regardless of these minor slips, The Venetian Qur'an is a rich, carefully written, and attentively translated monograph that will surely be enjoyed by historians and philologists alike.