Giovanni da Verrazzano
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40 free Giovanni Da Verrazzano trivia questions with answers — history quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Giovanni da Verrazzano reached New York's harbour long before the explorers most people associate with it, then spent centuries half forgotten. He was an Italian navigator in French service, and in 1524 he became the first European known to sail the Atlantic coast of North America from the Carolinas to Canada. These fun facts about Giovanni da Verrazzano come as quiz questions, each with its answer and a short explanation. They cover his upbringing and early travels, the royal voyage in search of a passage to Asia, the mistakes that stayed on maps for generations, the people he met along the shore, and the strange story of his death. There is plenty on his afterlife too: the manuscript that proved his critics wrong, and the giant New York bridge whose name took decades to get right. The questions suit students working on an explorers project, teachers after a ready-made classroom quiz, and anyone who has crossed the bridge and wondered who it was named for. Start with the easier ones and see how far you get.
30 of 40 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01By the account most historians accept, how did the explorer Giovanni da Verrazzano die on a Caribbean island in 1528?
Eaten by cannibals
Eaten by cannibals is the version scholars favour: he rowed ashore, probably on Guadeloupe, while his ships sat anchored too far out to help.
Q 02Until 2018, New York's Verrazzano-Narrows Bridge officially misspelled the explorer's surname by leaving out what?
A second Z
A second Z went missing in a 1959 construction contract, and the bridge stayed Verrazano for nearly six decades until a student's campaign got it fixed.
Q 03Verrazzano saw the broad waters of Pamlico Sound behind North Carolina's Outer Banks and mistook them for which ocean?
The Pacific
The Pacific, he believed, lay just beyond a thin strip of sand, so maps showed a Sea of Verrazzano cutting into North America for about a century.
Q 04In 1524 Verrazzano likened an island off New England to which Greek island?
Rhodes
Rhodes was his comparison, and later colonists assumed he meant Aquidneck Island. That is one theory for how Rhode Island got its name; a rival traces it to a Dutch phrase for a red island.
Q 05Verrazzano's letter complains that Native traders on the coast of Maine mocked his departing crew in which rude way?
Baring their bottoms
Baring their bottoms and laughing was the farewell he recorded. These traders around Casco Bay were already used to bargaining with Europeans.
Q 06Verrazzano entered New York Harbor in 1524, 85 years before which English explorer whose name the river there now bears?
Henry Hudson
Henry Hudson arrived in 1609 sailing for the Dutch, and New Yorkers long treated his visit as the start of their history, leaving Verrazzano almost forgotten.
Q 07The towers of New York's Verrazzano-Narrows Bridge are so tall and far apart that its designers had to allow for what?
Earth's curvature
Earth's curvature leaves the 693-foot towers about one and five-eighths inches farther apart at their tops than at their bases.
Q 08A 1963 petition with thousands of signatures sought to rename the Verrazzano-Narrows Bridge after which American?
John F. Kennedy
John F. Kennedy had just been assassinated. His brother Robert promised the Verrazzano name would stay, and Idlewild Airport was renamed for the president instead.
Q 09Which French king, the patron who brought Leonardo da Vinci to his court, sent Verrazzano to North America in 1524?
Francis I
Francis I wanted a share of the New World's riches and a sea route to China, and Verrazzano named the land he found Francesca in the king's honour.
Q 10The Verrazzano-Narrows Bridge, named for the explorer who anchored nearby in 1524, joins Staten Island to which borough?
Brooklyn
Brooklyn and Staten Island face each other across the Narrows, the strait where Verrazzano anchored, and the bridge is still its only fixed crossing.
Q 11Giovanni da Verrazzano came from which Italian city-state, also the home of the Medici and of Amerigo Vespucci?
Florence
Florence was his family's city, and its merchants living in France later put up much of the money for his 1524 voyage.
Q 12Which annual sporting event begins by sending its competitors across both decks of the Verrazzano-Narrows Bridge?
New York City Marathon
New York City Marathon runners set off from Staten Island across the bridge, which normally carries only vehicles and is closed to traffic for the race.
Q 13On opening in 1964, the Verrazzano-Narrows Bridge took the record for longest suspension span from which landmark?
The Golden Gate
Q 21A bronze statue of Verrazzano was unveiled in 1909 in which green space at the southern tip of Manhattan?
The Battery
The Battery received the statue, by the sculptor Ettore Ximenes, after Italian Americans campaigned to remind New Yorkers who had reached their harbour first.
Q 22The 1529 world map by Verrazzano's brother Girolamo, a key record of the voyage, is now kept in which collection?
The Vatican
The Vatican holds the chart, the earliest map to carry the name New France, written on it as Nova Gallia.
Q 23Verrazzano's lone ship began its 1524 Atlantic crossing from which island group off the coast of northwest Africa?
Madeira
The Golden Gate had held the record since 1937, and the new span named for Verrazzano beat it by just 60 feet.
Q 14Verrazzano crossed the Atlantic in 1524 about 150 miles north of the course of which earlier Italian navigator?
Columbus
Columbus had crossed three decades earlier. Verrazzano's more northerly track brought him ashore in today's Carolinas rather than the Caribbean.
Q 15Verrazzano ended his 1524 survey of the American coast at which large island, already familiar to European fishermen?
Newfoundland
Newfoundland was known ground, so with supplies running low he turned for home there, having charted the coast all the way up from the Carolinas.
Q 16Verrazzano turned north instead of sailing on toward Florida, wary of meeting ships of which rival European power?
Spain
Spain claimed Florida and patrolled its waters, and Verrazzano had spent time harassing that kingdom's shipping before he set out across the ocean.
Q 17Although Verrazzano was hunting for a passage west, he sailed past which bay, the largest estuary in the United States?
Chesapeake Bay
Chesapeake Bay has a mouth about twelve miles wide, yet his letter never mentions it. He probably passed too far offshore to see the opening.
Q 18Castello di Verrazzano, the explorer's ancestral family home, still makes wine in the heart of which Italian region?
Chianti
Chianti vines at Verrazzano are mentioned in a manuscript from 1150, more than three centuries before the explorer was born.
Q 19Which ship, the only one of Verrazzano's four vessels to cross the Atlantic in 1524, carried him along America's coast?
La Dauphine
La Dauphine was a royal ship of about 100 tons with a crew of some fifty. A storm claimed two of the other vessels, and La Normande turned back before the crossing.
Q 20Which Native American people paddled out in about thirty canoes to meet Verrazzano's ship in New York Bay in 1524?
Lenape
Lenape people came toward the ship with cries of wonder, dressed in feathers of many colours, in their first recorded meeting with Europeans.
Madeira was his last landfall. He slipped away from a deserted islet there with a crew of fifty and enough provisions for eight months.
Q 24On a 1527 voyage to South America, Verrazzano brought home a cargo of which timber, prized in Europe for its red dye?
Brazilwood
Brazilwood filled the holds of the ships that made it home, a consolation prize for failing once again to find a passage to Asia.
Q 25Verrazzano was once confused with Jean Fleury, a corsair who seized Aztec treasure sent home by which conquistador?
Hernán Cortés
Hernán Cortés lost a fortune in Aztec gold when Fleury seized his treasure ships in the early 1520s. Historians have since shown that the pirate and the explorer were different men.
Q 26What did the discovery of the Cèllere Codex, a manuscript annotated by Verrazzano himself, settle about his voyage?
Whether it happened at all
Whether it happened at all was in real doubt: some 19th-century scholars called the voyage a fabrication until the manuscript surfaced in a private library in Italy.
Q 27Verrazzano named part of the Atlantic coast Arcadia, a likely source of the name Acadia, for the beauty of its what?
Trees
Trees inspired the name, borrowed from an idyllic region of Greece. Later mapmakers shifted it north until it settled on Canada's Atlantic provinces.
Q 28Verrazzano spent about two weeks at anchor in which New England bay, where another bridge bearing his name now stands?
Narragansett Bay
Narragansett Bay struck him as a fine harbour that would be easy to fortify; his anchorage there, which he called Refugio, is identified with modern Newport.
Q 29The Italian navy named which type of warship after Giovanni da Verrazzano, a vessel sunk by a British submarine in 1942?
A destroyer
A destroyer of the Navigatori class carried his name. All twelve ships of the class honoured Italian explorers, and only one of them survived the war.
Q 30Verrazzano's only known signature, on a 1526 deed kept in Rouen, gives his name in which language?
Latin
Latin was his choice: he signed as Janus Verrazanus, a classical flourish typical of an educated Renaissance man.