Introduzione: Quante Americhe? Le ragioni di un dubbio

Buried within the pages of a fourteenth-century Milanese chronicle lies an ostensibly marginal detail: the Dominican friar Galvaneus Flamma mentions an unknown land called “Marckalada,” situated beyond Greenland. No overseas voyage, no map—yet in that name echoes the Icelandic sagas recounting the arrival of northern European seafarers on the American shores nearly five centuries before Christopher Columbus. How Many Americas? takes this reference as its point of departure to investigate the question of a European presence in the New World prior to its conventional “discovery” in 1492. Drawing connections between Latin and Old Norse sources, archaeological findings, pseudo-documentaries, and modern rewritings, the volume examines the fraught interplay between memory and invention, historical event, documentary source, and interpretive framework. What emerges is a vision of a plural America: at once real and imagined, narrated and recalled, shaped by shifting historical contexts and evolving cultural needs.