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GRAPPUTO, Tommaso. GLI AUSPICII NUZIALI A NAPOLEONE IL MASSIMO. Venezia: Picotti, 1810. £300

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FIRST EDITION. 8vo, pp. 95, [1]; prose and verse, pages dedicated to the ‘argomento’ before each prose section (printed only on recto), wide-margined, deckle edges, signed legal notice (‘i soli Esemplari con la seguente sottoscrizione’ etc.) to final page; scattered foxing and smudges to margins, otherwise a very clean copy; in later pink patterned boards, manuscript spine label; spine worn, with parts missing at head and tail, joints cracked, sides of boards rubbed, corners bumped.

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Uncommon first edition of the Venetian lawyer Tommaso Grapputo’s (1772-1834) celebration of Napoleon’s betrothal to the Austrian archduchess Marie-Louise. Written in a combination of verse and prose, it is the second of three such panegyrics composed by Grapputo in the years after the War of the Fifth Coalition, following La selva napoleoniana (1809) and coming before Per la nascita dell’augusto primogenito di Napoleone il Magno (1811).

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Grapputo’s poems fit into an Italian literary tradition going back to the establishment of the Cisalpine and Ligurian republics, when Ugo Foscolo composed his Oda a Bonaparte liberatore (before the Treaty of Campo Formio, in 1797) and Vicenzo Monti his Prometeo (1797). Usually centred around military victories and peace treaties, in 1810, many poems were written to mark Bonaparte’s politically significant second marriage, often making use of grandiose classical allegory (Grapputo, for instance, includes hymns to Jupiter, Mars and Venus). The long-awaited birth of Bonaparte’s son was then celebrated in around two-hundred poems published in 1811 alone. In her work on the subject, Millar observes that Gli auspicii nuziali a Napoleone il Massimo is unusual in that ‘Grapputo took the opportunity to speak of the need for peace’ (Millar, p.109) at the end of his hymn to Mars: ‘Marte deponi il brando; assai le glebe/ Dell’ Europa fumar d’innocuo sangue,/ E Umanità di tante stragi è sazia./ ’ (p.56. ‘Mars, lay down your sword; the fields of Europe smoke enough with harmless blood, and Humanity is sated with so many massacres.) 

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Millar, Eileen Anne, Napoleon in Italian Literature (1796-1821) (Roma: Edizioni di storia e letteratura, 1977); OCLC records three locations outside continental Europe, at the BL, UNC Chapel Hill, and UCLA. 

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