In 1519, he joined the Spanish expedition to the Spice Islands led by Portuguese explorer Ferdinand Magellan, the world's first circumnavigation, and is best known for being the chronicler of the voyage.

Pigafetta was one of the 18 men who made the complete trip, returning to Spain in 1522, under the command of Juan Sebastián Elcano, out of the approximately 240 who set out three years earlier.

Recent archival research indicates that his father was Giovanni Pigafetta and his mother was a noblewoman named Lucia, daughter of Marco Muzan.

[2] There is a tradition that as a youth Pigafetta sailed the Mediterranean with the Knights of Rhodes but there is no record of such activity, only the observation that he later became a member of the order.

[3] At some point he entered into the service of papal ambassador Francesco Chiericati, an apostolic protonotary and a close associate of Pope Leo X.

[3] While in Spain, Pigafetta heard of Magellan's planned expedition to find a western route to the Spice Islands.

[4][5] When the expedition set sail in August 1519, Pigafetta was assigned to the flagship Trinidad where he served Magellan and became his great admirer.

Upon reaching port in Sanlúcar de Barrameda in the modern Province of Cadiz in September 1522, three years after his departure, Pigafetta returned to the Republic of Venice.

Transylvanus had been instructed to interview some of the survivors of the voyage when Magellan's surviving ship, Victoria, returned to Spain in September 1522 under the command of Juan Sebastian Elcano.

[7] It is unclear when it was first published and what language had been used in the first edition, given that the original text was lost, though it is believed that it might have been written in the author's Venetian dialect, mixed with Spanish and Italian.

[8] The remaining sources of his voyage were extensively studied by Italian archivist Andrea da Mosto, who wrote a critical study of Pigafetta's book in 1898 (Il primo viaggio intorno al globo di Antonio Pigafetta e le sue regole sull'arte del navigare[9]) and whose conclusions were later confirmed by J.

[10] The most complete manuscript, and the one that is supposed to be more closely related to the original manuscript, is the one found by Carlo Amoretti inside the Biblioteca Ambrosiana, Milan and published in 1800 (Primo viaggio intorno al globo terraqueo, ossia ragguaglio della navigazione alle Indie Orientali per la via d'Occidente fatta dal cavaliere Antonio Pigafetta patrizio vicentino, sulla squadra del capitano Magaglianes negli anni 1519-1522).