Ugolino, with his brother Guido or Vandino Vivaldo, was in command of this expedition of two galleys, which he had organized in conjunction with Tedisio Doria, and which left Genoa in May 1291 with the purpose of going to India "by the Ocean Sea" and bringing back useful things for trade.
The expedition of the Vivaldi brothers was one of the first recorded voyages that sailed out from the Mediterranean into the Atlantic since the Fall of the Western Roman Empire in the 5th century AD.
[2] In 1455 another Genoese seaman, Antoniotto Uso di Mare, sailing with Cadamosto in the service of Prince Henry the Navigator of Portugal, claimed to have met, near the mouth of the Gambia, with the last descendant of the survivors of the Vivaldo expedition.
Under the entry of the year 1291, Doria writes the following: "Tedisio d'Oria, Ugolino Vivaldi and a brother of the latter, together with a few other citizens of Genoa, initiated an expedition which no one up to that time had ever attempted.
Having stocked them with provision, water and other necessities, they sent them on their way, in the month of May, toward the Strait of Ceuta in order that the galleys might sail through the ocean sea to India and return with useful merchandise.
May God watch over them and bring them back safely" [3]Additional documents identify the other brother as "Vadino", that Tedesio Doria (Jacopo's nephew) did not embark, that the supplies were for "ten years", that the names of the vessels were Sanctus Antonius and Alegranzia, and that the ship made a brief stop at Majorca before proceeding.
"Gozora" is a name found in some Medieval charts for Cape Nun, which lies before the Canary Islands (e.g. Caput Finis Gozole in the maps of Giovanni da Carignano, early 1300s, and the Pizzigani brothers, 1367).
In the first, the narrator, traveling in what seems like the Guinea region (sub-Saharan Africa) reaches the city of Graçiona, capital of the black African empire of Abdeselib, which is allied to Prester John.
"[7] When the traveling friar moves on to the neighboring city of Magdasor, he came across a Genoese man named Sor Leone who was in this city "searching for his father who had left in two galleys, as I have already explained, and they gave him every honor, but when this Sor Leone wanted to traverse to the empire of Graciona to search for his father, the emperor of Magdasor did not allow it, because way was doubtful and the path was dangerous"[8] As it happens, Sorleone is the real name of Ugolino's actual son.
However, the narrator's geographical references (e.g. to the Senegal-Niger River, the gold trade, the Mali Empire, even the Gulf of Guinea) suggest that Abdelsalib and Magdasor were in non-Muslim sub-Saharan West Africa.
This is what is related by the Genoese noble Antoniotto Usodimare[11]Gion is the name of the biblical Gihon river, which stems from the Garden of Eden and flows through Ethiopia.