Nicoletta Bruno is Research Fellow at the Ludwig Boltzmann Institute for Neo-Latin Studies Innsbruck and Teaching Fellow in Latin Literature at the Università degli Studi di Bari ‘Aldo Moro’.

After her PhD in Classics at the University of Bari ‘Aldo Moro’ (‘Doctor Europaeus’ with the universities of Oxford and Freiburg im Breisgau), she was Research Fellow at the Thesaurus Linguae Latinae (Bavarian Academy of Sciences and Humanities), Fritz-Thyssen Stiftung Postdoctoral Fellow at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München, and Junior Fellow at the Alfried Krupp Wissenschaftskolleg Greifswald.

She has worked on Latin epic poetry, ancient historiography, Latin lexicography, and classical tradition. She is author of several books, including a commentary on Lucretius, De rerum natura 5, 1110-1349 (Nordhausen 2020), articles in peer-reviewed journals such as Trends in Classics, Maia, Giornale Italiano di Filologia, Exemplaria Classica, Euphrosyne, and book chapters to edited volumes published by De Gruyter, Wiley Blackwell, Brepols.

The first English translation and exhaustive commentary of Peter Martyr d’Anghiera’s De Orbe Novo Decades on the Spanish Conquest of the Aztec Empire (Decades, IV, 6-10 – V, 1-6) is the core of her research project at the LBI.  Initially serving monarchs Isabella and Ferdinand, and later Charles V, Peter Martyr was tasked with chronicling the discovery of the New World by Columbus, spread across eight Decades. Though Martyr never visited the New World, he had access to a variety of sources, including Christopher Columbus’ reports and the letters by Hernán Cortés. Martyr’s narrative includes Latinized terms from modern languages, notably Spanish, and indigenous ones, such as Nahuatl, to represent the New World as a continuation of the ancient one. The fourth and the fifth Decades focus on the conquest of Mexico.