Rare books, manuscripts and ephemera from five centuries

Social letter writing for aspiring Italianists 

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ROST, Johannes Leonhart. INSTRUTTIONE O NOTITIA DE' VIGLIETTI che in occasione di varii interessi sogliono spedirsi dagli huomini a persone dell' uno e dell' altro sesso, come anco da diverse donne alle loro confidenti e buone Amiche, concepita, e dichiarata con Regole ed essempi nella lingua Tedesca da Giovanni Leonardo Rost, e tradotta nell' Idioma Italiano da Francesco Ludovico Tonelli. Norimberga: appresso Giovanni Giacomo Walrab, 1745. £350

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First Italian Translation. 8vo, pp. [vi], 448, [64], with engraved frontispiece; woodcut initials, head-, and tailpieces; occasional spotting to first few leaves, but largely clean and fresh; ownership inscription of the school at Kfems, dated 1818, in a neat hand at head of title-page; in contemporary speckled boards; textblock slightly split from binding at bottom hinge, but holding; somewhat worn and rubbed but still sound, with old library shelf-label of the Collegio Cremsensis (in Krems, Austria) on front pastedown.

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Very uncommon Italian adaptation, by the Nuremberg-based Italian translator Francesco Ludovico Tonelli, of Die leichteste Art teutsche Briefe zu schreiben, a popular guide to letter-writing by the astronomer and novelist Johann Leonhard Rost (1688-1727), which had first appeared, also in Nuremberg, in 1717.

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The work, which was designed not for Italian speakers but for Germans learning Italian, is divided into fifty paragrafi, each of which contains samples of correspondence appropriate to all manner of (largely social) situations, for both men and women, including many dealing with aspects of love and courtship. We find formulae for letters of advise to one’s libertine friends, how to invite a woman to the fireworks (and how best she might respond), how to remind a friend of promises made a while ago, how to write letters of condolence, how to placate an angry friend, and even the tricky matter of writing to a lover accused of infidelity. The present copy found its way into the library of the school at Krems, in Austria, which might raise the odd question about the nature of its curriculum.

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A second edition, similarly rare, of Tonelli’s translation appeared in 1750. 

OCLC records copies at Mainz and the Anna Amalia Bibliothek. 

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