[In a 1503 letter to Lorenzo Pietro Francesco Di Medici, explorer Amerigo Vespucci wrote how impressed he was by the idyllic places he passed through on his expeditions, where people walked around naked and where ‘Christian values’ had yet to penetrate. What is striking in his letter is how he could not understand how little importance the ‘natives’ attached to the material things that were so valued in Europe.]

Paradise lost [Amerigo Vespucci]

‘The wealth that we enjoy in this our Europe and elsewhere, such as gold, jewels, pearls, and other riches, they hold as nothing; and although they have them in their own lands, they do not labour to obtain them, nor do they value them.’