ANNOTATED BY THE AUTHOR’S PUPIL
ALLIONI, Carlo.
Flora Pedemontana sive enumeratio methodica stirpium indigenarum Pedemontii [– Florae Pedemontanae icones accedit explanatio nomenclaturae botanicae] … Tomus primus [– tertius].
Turin, Giovanni Michele Briolo, 1785.
Three vols, folio, pp. I: [vii], xix, [1 (blank)], 344; II: [iv], 366, 24, [2 (imprimatur, blank)]; III: [iv], xiv, [2 (blank)], with 92 numbered, hand-coloured copper-engraved botanical plates; title-pages printed in red and black, engraved allegorical vignette to titles, copper-engraved frontispiece portrait of Vittorio Amadeo III by Stagnon after Molinari to vol. I; a few short closed marginal tears and inkstains, browning to a handful of plates and to pp. 150–2 of vol. II, sporadic light foxing to plates; nonetheless a handsome set in contemporary cat’s paw calf, spines lined with contemporary printed waste and gilt in compartments, contrasting green and gold gilt lettering- and numbering-pieces, edges stained red, green silk place-markers (that of vol. III detached and loosely inserted), remnants of manuscript shelflabels to spines; joints of vol. I cracked, upper hinge splitting, circular dampstain to upper board, corners and extremities of all three vols worn, a few abrasions; contemporary ownership inscrip-tion ‘Joannis Baptista Balbis’ to front free endpapers of vols I and II and to front pastedown of vol. III, with annotations on c. 700 pp. in vols I and II and binomial nomenclature to plates in vol. III neatly labelled in the same hand, loosely inserted botanical sample with label dated 1830 in Balbi’s hand (vol. II, p. 74) and undated note ‘Scilla campanulata alla trappola del lupo à la vénerie par le Mr le Marquis … avec Molineri’ (vol. II, p. 162), several small leaves and seed pods preserved between the pages, between nineteenth-century bookplate of the Ricasoli-Firidolfi family to front pastedowns.
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Flora Pedemontana sive enumeratio methodica stirpium indigenarum Pedemontii [– Florae Pedemontanae icones accedit explanatio nomenclaturae botanicae] … Tomus primus [– tertius].
First edition of the earliest Italian regional floras by the ‘Linnaeus of Piedmont’, here in the extremely rare hand-coloured state and extensively annotated by Giovanni Battista Balbis, the author’s pupil and successor at the Botanical Garden of the University of Turin.
Carlo Allioni, FRS (1728–1804) was a physician and professor of botany at the University of Turin, and director of the university’s Botanical Gardens – established in 1729 as an extension of the medical faculty – from 1760 to 1781. The advent of the Linnean system of taxonomy prompted Allioni to begin cataloguing the species held at the garden as early as 1761, expanding to include a wide range of Piedmontese flora (among them several previously unclassified species), not merely those of medicinal significance; he and Linnaeus corresponded at length, and Linnaeus named the genus Allionia for him in 1753. Allioni’s Florae Pedemontanae, the culmination of twenty-five years of research, was published in three volumes, the first two listing 2,800 plants divided into twelve classes, and the third containing ninety-two magnificent botanical plates illustrated by Francesco Peyrolery and engraved by his son Pietro, depicting 237 exotic and native Piedmontese species; the hand-coloured state is extremely rare.
The gardens continued to flourish in the nineteenth century and reached their height under Giovanni Battista Balbis (1765–1831), Allioni’s successor, who recorded over five thousand species in his 1812 catalogue. Balbis has annotated nearly every page of the text volumes, providing for each species cross-references to Linnaeus, Carl Ludwig Willdenow, Carlo Antonio Lodovico Bellardi, and Dominique Villars, as well as to other works of Allioni’s and his own; he adds common names in French and occasionally in Italian, on a few corrections corrects Allioni, and adds in the names of subspecies not included in the work, such as Carex davalliana, discovered fifteen years after the publication of the Flora Pedemontana, and Veronica allionii, named for the author. Several fragments of petals, leaves, and seed-pods have been preserved between the pages, perhaps something of an occupational hazard for a botanist; Balbis has rather more deliberately inserted a large sample between p. 74 and p. 75 of vol. II, with an accompanying notecard dated 1830, a year before his death, identifying the specimen as a Schizanthus porrigens, a species of butterfly flower native not to Piedmont but to central Chile. A second note, inserted at p. 163, mentions a Scilla campanulata (Spanish bluebell) found whilst on a hunt with Ignazio Molineri (1741–1818), a close collaborator of Allioni’s and head gardener at the Botanical Garden of Turin.
Brunet I, cols 190–1 (‘les exemplaires avec planches coloriées sont plus chers que les autres’); Graesse I, p. 81; Nissen I, p. 154; Pritzel, p. 108 (‘Florae Pedemontanae exempla tabulis coloratis rarissime occurrunt’); Sitwell, pp. 67 and 69 (‘the coloured state is extremely rare’). On Allioni and Balbis, see Guglielmone and Siniscalco, ‘L’orto botanico dell’Università di Torino’, in Studi di Museologia Agraria 61 (2021), pp. 51–64.
