Q 01/05

The Vespucci family's coat of arms featured which insects, a play on what their surname means in Italian?

A) Bees

B) Wasps

C) Moths

D) Beetles

Answer · why

B) Wasps

Wasps were a visual pun: Vespucci means little wasps in Italian, so the family put the insects on its shield.

Q 02/05

Which country is said to owe its name to stilt houses that reminded Amerigo Vespucci of an Italian canal city?

A) Bolivia

B) Ecuador

C) Costa Rica

D) Venezuela

Answer · why

D) Venezuela

Venezuela means Little Venice in the usual telling, after lakeside villages raised on stilts, though one crewman wrote that the name came from a local...

Q 03/05

Which Brazilian city is named for a bay that an expedition carrying Amerigo Vespucci reached on New Year's Day 1502?

A) Rio de Janeiro

B) Salvador da Bahia

C) Porto Alegre

D) Fortaleza

Answer · why

A) Rio de Janeiro

Rio de Janeiro means January River, the name the sailors gave Guanabara Bay to mark the date they first saw it.

Q 04/05

Which American institution paid ten million dollars for the only surviving copy of the 1507 map that named America?

A) Smithsonian Institution

B) Library of Congress

C) National Archives

D) Harvard University

Answer · why

B) Library of Congress

The Library of Congress bought the map from a German princely family, in whose castle library it had lain unnoticed until 1901, and shows it in a spec...

Q 05/05

Simonetta Vespucci, wife of Amerigo's cousin and famed for her beauty, is said to have modelled for which painter?

A) Raphael

B) Giorgione

C) Botticelli

D) Michelangelo

Answer · why

C) Botticelli

Botticelli lived beside the Vespucci and is buried in their parish church, but historians now doubt the romantic tale that Simonetta posed for his pai...