Description of Africa (1550 book)

[3] It contained the first detailed descriptions published in Europe of the Barbary Coast (modern Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia) and the gold-trading kingdoms of west-central Africa.

[4] The book was dictated in Italian by Leo Africanus, the famed Moorish traveler and merchant who had been captured by pirates and sold as a slave.

It was in Ramusio's manuscript that Pietro Bembo read it and was astonished: "I cannot imagine how a man could have so much detailed information about these things", he wrote to a correspondent, 2 April 1545.

The book was an enormous success in Europe, and was translated into many other languages,[8] remaining a definitive reference work for decades (and to some degree, centuries) afterwards.

[9] A twentieth-century rediscovery of the originally-dictated manuscript revealed that Ramusio, in smoothing the grammar of Leo Africanus's text had coloured many neutral details,[10] to make it more palatable to Christian European audiences; French and English translators added further embellishments.