Moses Vita Cassuto is a little-known member of the early eighteenth century of a distinguished Jewish Florentine family of which happily representatives are still with us.
Posterity should know him as one of the long list of Jewish travellers whose painstaking records of their often painful journeys did so much to guide their contemporaries and to enrich our knowledge in later ages.
Moses Cassuto in his diary written for his wife discloses incidentally something of himself.
He was a merchant of reasonable means, a dealer in precious stones but an educated man of the world, accustomed to mix in the highest society; he was devoutly religious and devoted to his family, and we see him as a patient (if not always very precise) recorder of things seen and heard, and a careful scribe. In visiting places attributed Biblical or other pious associations, he is frankly credulous and uncritical. Perhaps be is not to be reckoned in the front rank of either diarists or travel writers, but in this restricted field he certainly by his sincerity holds his place and our interest, whether as Jews or historians.

Moses’s diary is written in the Italian of the period, but bas occasional descriptive rubrics and quotations in Hebrew, usually concerning Hebrew communities.

His first journey to the Holy land took place 1733-1735
At the commencement of the diary proper, he explains that the reason for his journey was to take his new-born son to be brought up in the Holy Land, to study the law of God and nothing else; accordingly he travelled to Hebron by way of A1exandria and Cairo with this infant-in-arms, and accompanied by one servant – returning overland through Northem Palestine, Saida, Damascus, A1eppo, Istanbul, Belgrade, Vienna, and Venice, then home to Florence. The journey took a year and a half, from 8 October 1733 to 5 April 1735, and proved most arduous.

Second journey was to the north, 1741-1743.He travelled partly in company with his brother David Cassuto and his faithful servant, the companion of his previous journey, Isache di Tranquillo Gallico, and two others. The party first visited Genoa, his wife’s home town, where he had met and married her in 1723. From there the itinerary takes him through Monaco, Paris, and Calais to England. After a short stay in London they retumed to Holland and journeyed through Germany and Austria back to Florence.