THE HOLY LAND FOR THE ARMCHAIR PILGRIM
ADRICHEM, Christian van; Francesco BALDELLI, translator.
Gerusalemme e suoi dintorni ai tempi di Gesù Cristo. Mappa e descrizione istorica di Cristiano Adricomio ... colla giunta d’una trattazione sul sepolcro e transito della SS. Vergine del canonico L. Grassi ...
Genoa, Tipografia arcivescovile, 1882.
8vo, pp. vii, [1 (blank)], 165, [1 (blank)], [2 (index, blank)], with half-title, large folding map at end; offset to half of half-title, variable foxing throughout (heavier to first and final leaves); a good copy with the original printed wrappers laid down, printed in orange, black, yellow, blue, and green; some staining, a few short closed tears to lower cover.
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Gerusalemme e suoi dintorni ai tempi di Gesù Cristo. Mappa e descrizione istorica di Cristiano Adricomio ... colla giunta d’una trattazione sul sepolcro e transito della SS. Vergine del canonico L. Grassi ...
Scarce first edition thus of Baldelli’s sixteenth-century translation of this guide to Jerusalem for pilgrims by the Dutch cartographer Christian van Adrichem, instrumental in popularising the Stations of the Cross and the basis for maps of the Holy Land well into the eighteenth century.
The Catholic priest Adrichem (1533–1585) was expelled from his native Delft in the wake of the Reformation and died in Cologne, where his biblical atlas Theatrum terrae sanctae et biblicarum historiarum was printed in 1590. Although he had never visited Jersualem, the work includes a detailed plan of the city and its surroundings in the time of Christ, including over 250 numbered locations of biblical significance described at length in the text. Pictured are, inter alia, the palaces of David, Solomon, Herod, and Agrippa, and the Temple (also depicting a High Priest), as well as Golgotha and the Via Dolorosa. Adrichem encourages readers to follow the Way of the Cross without leaving home, making an interior pilgrimage of sorts ‘within the temple or the chamber of the imagination’ (p. 67, trans.).
The present edition reissues Baldelli’s Italian translation of 1594 (Vero ritratto della città di Gierusalemme), which in the foreword is described as having fallen into obscurity, being unknown to Mazzuchelli. The publication of this edition was prompted by the discovery of a copy of Baldelli’s translation at a convent in Florence, and adds a work on the death of the Virgin by Luigi Grassi, author of an 1872 history of bishops and archbishops of Genoa.
OCLC finds three copies in the US (Harvard, Illinois, Yale), and none in the UK. Not in Library Hub.
