Rare books, manuscripts and ephemera from five centuries

The state of Italian poetry in the 1710s 

 

[HERTZ, Giovanni Gabrlello, ed]. POESIE ITALIANE DI RIMATORI VIVENTI non mai per l’addietro stampate agl’illustrissimi signori principe ed assistenti dell’illustrissima Accademia de signori Innominati di Brà In Venezia: appresso Gio. Gabbriello Ertz, MDCCXVII [1717]. £750

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FIRST EDITION. 8vo, pp. [6], 324, [1]; with engraved frontispiece and title-page vignette; sporadic worming, touching letters in several places but with no loss of sense; dampstain to last few gatherings, uncut in contemporary blue interim wrappers; title in ink on spine; old ms shelf-label at foot of spine; spine worn with some loss of paper near foot, and wrappers slightly stained and worn, but sound.

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Uncommon anthology of poems by 62 contemporary Italian poets, published by the Venetian printing firm founded by Giovanni Giacomo Hertz, and continued by his heirs after his death around 1695.

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A collection of work by living female poets had been published the previous year in Venice by Sebastiano Coleti, under the title Poesie italiane di rimatrici viventi, edited by Giovanni Battista Recanati, and had clearly been enough of a success that Hertz thought there might be a gap in the market for the hitherto under-represented male poet. This collection, addressed to the Accademia degli Innominati of Bra (one of only two literary academies in Piedmont to be affiliated to the Arcadians of Rome, a column of which it became in 1717) just as its predecessor had been collected by a member of the Arcadians, ranges from canzoni and canzonette to terza rima and sonnets, all of which are previously unpublished, at least in the forms found here. Among the poets represented are Scipione Maffei, with eleven poems, Eustachio Manfredi (’Ninfe, e Pastori’), Giovanni Battista Recanati (fresh from his editing duties of the previous year), Gabriello Soardi, Giuseppe Leoni and both Giampetro and Francesco Maria Zanotti. 

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See Simonetta Pelusi, ‘”Taxis, id est, ordo”: epistole dedicatorie a Ferdinando Torriano de Tassis, letterato e accademico a Venezia’, in B. Crevato-Selvaggi and R. Gerola (eds), Storia postale. Sguardi multidisciplinari, sguardi diacronici (Ist. di Studi Storici Postali, 2024), pp. 273-4; OCLC records three copies outwith Continental Europe, at Duke, the BL, and the V&A. 

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[ref: 2596 ]