A MOST amazing and influential adventure began with the ‘discovery’ of the continental areas known today as the Americas, north, central, and south, since the late 15th Century. Added to this enormous event is the important fact that this stunningly beautiful and mostly tropical geographical area quickly came to be known as the ‘New World’, because, for centuries prior, those geographical areas of Europe, the Middle East, Africa and Asia were already partly known to each other via various texts, since they were concentrated in interconnected landscapes of varying climate.
By contrast, the Americas remained unknown to this ‘Old World’ for thousands of years. The role of a few Italians such as Cristoforo Colombo and Amerigo Vespucci in bridging the gap between these ‘New’ and ‘Old’ worlds was followed by the strange ability of Italy’s Venetian architectural styles and agricultural estates to bear conducive relevance to the progression of civic values and practical lifestyles throughout the Americas, especially in South America’s English-speaking Guyana of today.

                                             
Before Columbus and Vespucci
Of course, to attribute the ‘discovery’ of South America, or the Americas, to Columbus and Vespucci is today somewhat a ridiculed assertion, justified by the obvious fact that they found a tropical indigenous civilization that had already settled there for at least 30,000 years BC, and even more interesting for a continent whose past still bears exciting pockets of mystery, is the evidence of prior Viking settlements and early Africans with apparent strong cultural influence upon this early Native Indian civilization; a theme explored by the respected Guyanese literary historian, Ivan Van Sertima, in his best-selling book, ‘They came before Columbus’, first published in the mid-70s and translated into several languages.    
However, the importance of Columbus and Vespucci really lies elsewhere, in their ‘discovery’ of this part of the globe, specifically for Europe and the rest of the world, since, whether American Native Indians first came from Asia, or pioneer Egyptian or North African sources influenced their early culture, neither of these founding parties returned to their original continents and cultures across the seas to report and share their knowledge with their kind, and the rest of the world.
The importance of Columbus lies in three examples of influence on the progression towards a worldwide civilisation after the lessons of the Roman Empire, and prior to the dissemination of information via electronic media and today’s computerized Internet:
(1) The return to port of origin;
(2) reportage; and
(3) the duplicated spread of knowledge via book publication.
Though early non-Western Chinese and Arab civilizations had achieved far more developments before Western civilization, neither of these non-Western civilizations democratized the spread of knowledge beyond oral teaching, and the duplicated printing and binding of manuscripts as books.
Instead, printed knowledge was reserved for privileged sects, or one revered book was elected to instruct and guide all human thought and behaviour for the masses. The rise and adoption of Western civilization worldwide is rooted precisely in the Latin term ‘educere’, to lead, from which the civilized value called ‘education’ is derived, and is indelibly linked to free thought, linguistic reasoning and knowledge, which are all inseparable from reading, writing, and the duplication and consumption of in-depth texts. In short, rampant literacy.

                                           
Vespucci and America
Similarly there exists the remarkable human record the adventurous young banker from 16th Century Florence, Amerigo Vespucci, left us of his voyage along the northern coasts of South America, from the mouth of the Amazon and along the French Guiana, Suriname, Guyana, and Venezuelan coasts, where, upon seeing the interconnected bamboo architecture of the Tibitibi  (or Warrau) native Indians raised on stilts above the water between the dense islands at the mouth of the Orinoco, and also the Bay of Maracaibo, he called that latter terrain ‘little Venice’, or Venezuela.
Vespucci, in his fascinating 16th Century little book, titled ‘The New World’, not only proved the positively coincidental similarity between terrains and structures far apart yet universally related, but his first name, Amerigo, by being miraculously similar to the original native Indian name for the Amazon (of Greek reference), which was really the Amaraca River, the decision was made to later recognise and appreciate the coincidental, or natural conduciveness shared by the two words, which led to the invention and application of the name, America, a combination of the two words, for an entire continent.
How Andrea Palladio, the most precious and celebrated 16th Century Venetian architect, came to gradually influence the evolving architecture of today’s Guyana from the early 17th Century onwards is an obscure and fabulous unwritten story, rooted not in any imposed transferal of a foreign European culture, but rather practical values found to be mutually conducive in terrains of the world thousands of miles apart, yet sharing locally relevant styles of architectural structures.