Religious, merchants, gueriers or aventurists, Italian travellers of the 14th and 15th centuries enthusiastically embrace the novelty in their travel relations. Exotism or insolitis capture all their curiosity, even in their faith as Christians. The textual weight in relation to the old one serves as a test first, for everyone, and stands out as a guarantor of their ‘narrative’, first and foremost the ancient Greek-Roman referent; and it is the entire proceedings in the Book that their written submissions reveal, in whatever form. Not everything is new, in fact, and contact with necessarily ‘new’ realities is confronted, in all cases, with the earlier, very old, ‘authoritative’ text, despite the strangers exerted on them by the unknown. However, there will be a slow change, which is gradually putting aside and obliterating the written testimony that had hitherto had the force of law. A brutal and sometimes long contored nature, exchange, ‘tasty’ will even become a subject for education: any journey to a distant country then has a prominent educational function, a new ethos. New “authorities” then emerge much more contemporary than before: For example, Dante; infinite more sensory knowledge is the prelude of or accompanying a new relationship with transcription. With or after Asia, Africa helps the traveller show his own identity in contact with the autochthonous one, that is to say, real indigenous realities. The narrative of the discoveries of a certain objectivity, be they Asian, African or Amerindian, therefore emerges only slowly, not uniformly, sometimes from old delivery authority to only gain identity authenticity in the 16th century. For a long time as the Passé Book, the travel relationship has gradually become, not without sharp contradictions, a book of the Futur, which is relatively independent of the ‘antique’ matricial weight. Lacroix Jean. The weight of antique among Italian travellers in the 14th and 15th centuries. In: Antiquity seen by travellers. Acts of the 130th National Congress of Historical and Scientific Societies, Travel and Travellers, La Rochelle, 2005. Paris: CTHS Editions, 2009 pp. 78-91. (Acts of the National Congress of Historical and Scientific Societies, 130-6)