This weekend in Milan
Enjoy a wonderful book and culture fair and preview the exciting upcoming exhibition on the Italian book this Saturday and Sunday at Milan’s Salone della cultura
This weekend at Milan’s 4th annual Salone della Cultura, the Italian Antiquarian Booksellers’ Association (ALAI) will be offering a preview of the upcoming exhibition, The Italian Book: The Italian bibliographical heritage in libraries, the antiquarian book trade and private collections, to be held at the Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale in Rome this June and July.
A collaborative effort organised by the National Library in close partnership with the ALAI, the Italian Book exhibition will celebrate the importance and prestige of the Italian book by revealing the rich cultural history of the country’s bibliographical heritage. In relaying this story, the exhibition will bring together bibliographic gems from a variety of sources to highlight the myriad ways in which the worlds of private collecting and the antiquarian book trade are woven together with the history of Italian institutional libraries.
Given the exhibition’s interest in bringing together the public and private worlds that make up the book’s cultural history, what better place to preview this great exhibition than at Milan’s Salone della Cultura, a celebration of culture for all kinds of book lovers organized by Matteo Luteriani from Luni Editrice and Sergio Malavasi of Maremagnum. Known as “Italy’s largest bookstore” with over 500,000 books on display, the fair features new and antique books of all genres and formats, along with conferences, workshops, and lectures, and is aimed at anyone passionate about culture in the fullest sense of the word.
We are delighted to announce that three of PrPh books’ selected for the Rome exhibition will be on display at the Milan preview this weekend: a marvellous illuminated manuscript intended for Pope Pius Piccolomini, a typographical monument in the form of St. Augustine’s De Civitate Dei, and a volume containing two incredibly rare works by the celebrated Italian philosopher Giordano Bruno.
Salone della cultura
Saturday, January 18 & Sunday, January 19
Superstudio Più, Via Tortona, 27 - 20144 Milan (MI)
Read more about The Italian Book: The Italian bibliographical heritage in libraries, the antiquarian book trade and private collections here.
Girolamo Aliotti (1412-1480).
Gratulatio ad Pium II pro foelici, ac secundo ex Mantuana peregrinatione reditu. Dialogus de optimo vitae genere deligendo. De monachis erudiendis. Illuminated manuscript on parchment, in Latin. [Florence, 1460].
A deluxe illuminated manuscript with texts by the Aretine abbot and humanist Girolamo Aliotti and offered offered by him as a gift to Pope Pius II Piccolomini (1405-1464), one of the most interesting and multifaceted figures of the Italian Renaissance.
The two had become acquainted in the early years of their common training at the Gymnasium in Siena, and the manuscript narrates a fascinating tale of patronage as the Aretine abbot sought to win the new pope’s favour.
A total work of art, the manuscript was produced in the Florentine workshop run by the ‘king of booksellers’ Vespasiano da Bisticci (1421-1498), an internationally renowned figure in the production of illuminated manuscripts who counted among his clients kings, popes, cardinals, and bishops, in addition to numerous eminent (and affluent) scholars throughout Europe.
See full details here.
Aurelius Augustinus (354-430).
De Civitate Dei. Rome, Conradus Sweynheym and Arnoldus Pannartz, in the house of Petrus de Maximo, 1468.
The subject of our recent blog post, this remarkable, wide-margined and illuminated copy of the rare second edition of De Civitate Dei – the first printed in Rome – represents one of the most influential works of Western thought, completed by the bishop Augustine of Hippo in the year 426.
The book was printed by the German clerics Conradus Sweynheym and Arnoldus Pannartz, who had worked for Johann Gutenberg in Mainz and had introduced printing to Italy in 1465 through their first press at the Benedictine monastery of Subiaco, some forty miles east of Rome.
See full details here.
Bruno, Giordano (1548-1600).
Figuratio Aristotelici Physici auditus... Ad illustrem admodum atque reuerendum dominum D. Petrum Dalbenium Abbatem Belleuillae. Paris, Pierre Chevillot, 1586. [bound with:] Idem. Dialogi duo de Fabricii Mordentis Salernitani propè diuina adinuentione ad perfectam cosmimetriae praxim. Paris, Pierre Chevillot, 1586.
This exceptional, miscellaneous volume – presented in its contemporary binding – contains two of the scarcest works by the celebrated Italian philosopher Giordano Bruno, the Figuratio Aristotelici Physici auditus, and the Dialogi duo de Fabricii Mordentis Salernitani. No copy of the Figuratio has come up at auction since the early nineteenth century, while the Dialogi duo has never appeared on the market before this copy.
The Figuratio Aristotelici Physici auditus deals with Aristotle's physics and was likely published by Bruno at the beginning of 1586, during his second stay in Paris. Only four copies of the Figuratio are recorded in the institutional libraries: those preserved in the National Library in Turin, the Bibliothèque nationale in Paris, the Bodleian Library in Oxford, and the Smithsonian Institute in Washington, DC; the copies in Paris and in Turin are both imperfect.
See full details here.