italian

First edition of this souvenir account of a balloon ascent and parachute descent made by the pioneering French aeronaut, Élisa Garnerin, in Italy. An early pioneer of parachuting, Élisa had already made numerous drops in Paris and further afield in France, her performances often attracting enormous crowds. More than any other contemporary woman, it might be said without undue irony that her career was one of ups and downs — her celebrity as a balloonist and parachutist met with considerable opposition from the police, who found the crowds she drew to be troublesome, and her business probity was frequently questioned by her associates.

The illustrations in this pamphlet include a version of her circular portrait by Bouchardy made in Paris using the physionotrace apparatus invented by Gille-Louis Chrétien designed to copy physical features and simultaneously reduce them to an engraved plate. The folding plate shows Élisa borne aloft in an elegant gondola beneath her balloon, and then the gondola released from the balloon for her parachute descent.

First edition of this rare manual for Giacometti’s evolution of the game of chess Il Giuoco della guerra which uses a board game format to teach the principles of military strategy, tactics, and fortification. It belongs to a genre of military games that developed in Europe during the eighteenth century — precursors to the Prussian Kriegsspiel and of modern board-based wargames. The pieces had names such as ‘generals’, ‘cannons’, ‘mortars’ and fortresses’. The engraved plate, dedicated by Pietro Remondini to the Cavaliere Brancaleone shows the field of battle, with double chess boards, separated by a symbolic river, all within an elaborate classical border of panelled friezes. The engraved frontispiece shows two allegorical female figures representing strategic warfare and honour or victory), flanking a large shield bearing a crowned eagle and a plinth bearing the double-headed image of Janus is behind.
It was reprinted several times and translated into French. WorldCat: Cleveland Public Library, Bodley, Dutch National Library only.

First edition with Lydis’s illustrations, complete with the 14 additional erotic plates to complement the 42 plates bound in (some of which are equally ‘libres’). Number 209 of 900 copies on Arches (after 56 Japon copies each with an additional drawing), total edition 956..

The holy grail — the crucified Christ standing within a chalice, his wound from the soldier’s spear bleeding freely into it, his arms supported by angels. A host of kneeling figures with candles, one swinging a censer kneel on either side. The lower panel depicts the Last Supper (complete with a small dog) with the text: ‘Sia laudato il santissimo sacramento’ (’Let the most holy sacrament be praised’). Early Christian tradition held that Christ’s blood was collected by Mary Magdalen at the time of the crucifixion in a vessel, though in images like this the symbolism is developed to depict blood flowing directly into the chalice in which Christ stands, emphasising the traditional connection between this vessel and the cup used at the Last Supper, and expressing the essence of transubstantiation at the Eucharist.
The image may be comprised of two woodblocks, though the borders are continuous around the whole print. Though probably dating from the seventeenth century, the block was clearly old when this impression was made, it shows some degradation, cracking and several circular wormholes. The area around Christ’s face is notably rubbed and soiled, possibly from kissing or touching as a mark of pious veneration.

The earliest portrait of Leopold Bloom. Mariette Lydis published this image in the first issue of the journal 900 with the fragment of Ulysses in the French translation by Auguste Morel. It is dated 1925 in the lower corner. No earlier illustration of Bloom is known (nor indeed any earlier illustration of Ulysses) and it predates Joyce’s famous but inept sketch of him made in Paris in 1926. Lydis’s Bloom was introduced (by us) in The James Joyce Broadsheet (issue 121, February 2022) and discussed in the Times Literary Supplement 6167 (11 June 2021).
Joyce was nominally a joint editor of the radical literary review 900 with Massimo Bontempelli. Mariette Lydis was Bontempelli’s lover at this period having separated from her second husband, Jean Lydis in 1925. Mariette knew Joyce and sketched his portrait the following year in Paris. Slocum & Cahoon, A Bibliography of James Joyce (953), D25 (p. 113).

An anti-Napoleonic tract, describing the French victories in Italy under Napoleon in 1796, under the figure of the Roman conquest of Greece. Having published more than one such critiques, Barzoni had fled Venice in 1797. First published in 1797 under false imprint, there were numerous editions and issues of I Romani nella Grecia with ‘London’ imprints like this, probably all printed in Venice.

Appended to this copy, probably contemporaneously are four popular patriotic songs or verses of a type which would have circulated semi-clandestinely in manuscripts like these. One is entitledL ‘Alfieri all sua Patria’. This edition not in ESTC, which lists a 1797 edition with the F. Rivington and G. Robinson imprint, and several other editions 1797-9.

First edition in Russian of Beccaria’s Dei Delittie e delle Pene (1764) translated from the French version of Morellot. In his fundamental Enlightenment legal treatise Beccaria opposed the death penalty and ‘maintained that the gravity of the crime should be measured by its injury to society and that the penalty should be related to this’ (Printing and the Mind of Man).

Long before its echo in Dostoevsy’s Crime and Punishment (1866), Beccaria’s work left its mark on Russian culture. It was enthusiastically read (in French) by Catherine the Great while codifying her own celebrated legal manifesto, Nakaz, of which almost a third of the text came directly from Beccaria, alongside major borrowings from Montesquieu’s L’Ésprit des lois. Given Catherine’s intellectual omnipotence it is perhaps unsurprising that no Russian edition of Beccaria appeared during her reign, even though its spirit imbued her widely disseminated Nakaz — required reading for anyone involved in Russian law and government. Thus Beccaria’s principles came to serve as ideals for future legislators in Russia and were fully incorporated into Russian criminal law by the end of the nineteenth century.

‘The first [Russian] translation of Beccaria came out in 1803. It was done by the poet D. Yazykov from the French translation by Morellet, edited by Roederer in 1797... the translation is one of the best in Russian. It manages to convey not only the ideas of the treatise but also the spirit, the language of Beccaria and his contemporaries. It is dedicated to Alexander I...’ (Cizova).

Dmitry Ivanovich Yazykov (1773-1845), writer, translator, academician and director of the Ministry of Public Education later published a translation of Montesquieu’s Esprit des Lois in 1809–14. Cf. Printing and the Mind of Man 209. Rare: Worldcat lists only the NYPL and Yale copies in anglophone countries. T. Cizova, ‘Beccaria in Russia.’ Slavonic and East European Review, Vol. 40, No. 95 (Jun. 1962), pp. 384-408.

A scarce little language tutor, first published some time before 1847, this edition with the account of a journey to London presented as dialogues and other useful examples. Millhouse was a tutor at Milan and produced a popular English-Italian dictionary.

A handsome Romantic reinterpretation of Vignola’s classic Renaissance manual of perspective, Due regole della prospettiva pratica (1582, with many later editions). Elements of Vignola’s diagrams are adapted for the oblong format of the book and often updated with figures and buildings in contemporary style. Bossi, about who we have been able to discover almost nothing beyond this manuscript, also adds a fine sequence of 4 coloured illustrations depicting furniture designs in the French Empire style by Percier and 17 superb monochrome views and interiors, 13 of which are in a sequence with their own decorative title-page ‘Aggiunta di alcune prospettive ricavae da classici autori.’�

This French adaptation of Machiavelli’s fable Belfagor arcidiavolo (’The Devil takes a Wife’) was probably the version used by La Fontaine for the fable Belphégor he included in the last volume of his Fables (1693). Le Fèvre’s version had first appeared in a very rare edition of 1661 (OCLC lists the Bn de France copy only) and this 1664 edition has Le Fèvre’s version of Plutarch’s Theseus added. The printer and place of publication has been deduced from copies in which it is bound with Le Fèvre’s Les Poètes grecs (also 1664).

Classicist Tanneguy Le Fèvre had been inspector of the Imprimerie royale at the Louvre before his appointment as professor at the protestant Académie at Saumur. He courted controversy with several of his works, judged libertine by his contemporaries, notably his biography of Sappho, in which he desisted from censuring her sexuality. Gay, III, 48, cf. Cioranescu 41672 (1661).

First edition, privately printed. The limitation notice reads ‘This Edition is issued to Subscribers only and limited to two hundred and fifty copies, numbered and signed by the Author. The price will be doubled after first of March, 1931’. This copy is, however, unsigned and unnumbered. The work forms issue no. 5 of The Lugano Series.

‘From 1920 until 1937 Douglas was settled in Florence... As his fame grew, he became much visited by inter-war writers, and forged close friendships with D. H. Lawrence and Bryher. During these years he lived with the publisher Giuseppe (Pino) Orioli, who helped him publish several limited editions, most of which were later commercially published in London... In 1937 Douglas was forced to flee Florence after the police made enquiries concerning his friendship with a ten-year-old local girl’ (Katherine Mullin in Oxford DNB).

First edition of these edited extracts from the Florentine chronicler Villani, with lives of Boccaccio, Bardi, Giotto, Paulus Geometrus (the mathematician and tutor to Boccaccio) and Cavalcanti, among others. There are several accounts of Italian medical practitioners, including Taddeo, Torrigiano and Dino and Tommaso del Garbo. The Villani family were the leading contemporary chroniclers of fourteenth-century Florence and Filippo was responsible for extending the chronicles of his father and uncle, adding famous portraits of his contemporaries. Towards the end of his life he was appointed public reader of the Divine Comedy and he died in 1404. His chronicle remained in manuscript before being published by the Brescian historian Mazzuchelli in 1747 in this version which was several times reprinted.

First edition of this play, copy on large and thick paper. Marescalchi was born in Bologna, then in the Papal States, on 26 February 1754, into a noble family, he became a hereditary member of the Senate of that town. He later supported Napoleon in Italy and prospered under his patronage.

Quinto Sectani was the pseudonym used by Sienese born poet and papal official Lodovico Sergardi. His fourteen Latin satires mocked contemporary Roman society and, more particularly, the poet and jurist Giovanni Vincenzo Gravina. In 1690 Gravina was instrumental in creating the Accademia degli Arcadi, founded with the intention of reforming Italian poetry. Gravina’s writing was steeped in influences from the classical past, resulting from his researches into Roman law and history, which was an attitude quite in tune with his fellow Arcadians early attempts to return to classical perfection in poetry. The Academy, however, soon found itself reverting to fashionable baroque style, a tendency deplored by Gravina, who tried to suppress any such decadent backsliding. He alienated many of his former friends and colleagues and was the butt of frequent satires.

Despite the claim of the title page (‘nunc primum in lucem editae’) the Satyrae first appeated at Rome, with the same false imprint, in 1696 There seem to have been several early pirated editions, as might be expected for a scurrilous work, which accused Gravina of both pedantry and paedophilia (Susan Dixon, Between the real and the ideal: the Accademia degli Arcadi and its garden in eighteenth-century Rome, 2006). Worldcat lists a single copy of this edition (Wake Forest University, NC).

First edition of this Jesuit missionary Hindustani-Portuguese grammar.

First edition. Considered to be the best play the author wrote in the traditional medium, a landmark in the history of the Italian theatre. The author was later the first Italian playwright to be awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature.