Rare books, manuscripts and ephemera from five centuries

The Patriarch comes to Venice 

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[MONDINI, Ruggero]. L'INVENZIONE DI SAN PAOLO PRIMO EREMITA Poemetto pubblicato nel solenne ingresso alla sede patriarchale di Venezia dell’eminentissimo D.D. Lodovico Flangini della S.R. Chiesa Cardinale Conte del S.R.I. ec. ec. ec. [Venice]: Appresso Marcellino Piotto, [c. 1803].  SOLD

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SOLE EDITION. 8vo, pp. [ii] blank, iii-vi, 7-31, [1] blank; clean and crisp throughout; in contemporary mottled calf, boards bordered in gilt, flat spine ruled in gilt; a couple of chips to leather on lower cover, but still an attractive copy.

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A lovely copy of this rare poem celebrating the pastoral visit to Venice of the city’s new Patriarch, Cardinal Ludovio Flangini (1733-1804), by the Venetian poet, novelist, and historian Ruggero Mondini (1739-1821).

Written in ottava rima, the poem, in 74 stanzas, celebrates the life of Paul of Thebes, the third-century Egyptian saint regarded as the first Christian hermit, whose relics were kept for a time in Venice before largely being relocated to Hungary (although a few remain in Ravenna). Flangini had succeeded Federico Maria Giovanelli as Patriarch of Venice in 1801, and arrived for his first and only pastoral visit to the city on May 2, 1803, encountering a city blighted by poverty, an ill-educated and ill-disciplined clergy, and general indifference to the Church. He quickly established new confraternities, made reforms to the training of the clergy, and had aspirations to set up a rhetorical academy for preachers, which were unrealised at his death less than a year after his arrival.

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Mondini was a notary in Venice who also wrote a number of poems and novels, five of which appeared in a collected edition in 1840 (Novelle ineditie di Ruggero Mondini e di Antonio Albertini, Venice, Tipografia di Alvisopoli). 

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Not in OCLC; SBN (IT\ICCU\VEAE\128577) records two copies in Venice, at the Marciana and the Istituto Cavanis. 

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