[ALMANACK.]
Lunario per l’anno 1855. Dell’insigne astronomo filos. e mat. Settimo Cajo Baccelli il vero rampollo dell’estinto Cajo, preceduto dale solite poesie giocose del D. Antonio Guadagnoli con le fiere che si fanno in Toscana e con le solite genealogie.
Florence, brothers Formigli, 1854.
16mo, pp. 80; with full-page woodcut of astrologer at his telescope to p. [1] and shooting star printer’s device to p. [2], woodcuts depicting the phases of the moon and the signs of the zodiac throughout; lightly toned with the occasional spot; but a good copy, pamphlet-stitched in contemporary blue wrappers.
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Lunario per l’anno 1855. Dell’insigne astronomo filos. e mat. Settimo Cajo Baccelli il vero rampollo dell’estinto Cajo, preceduto dale solite poesie giocose del D. Antonio Guadagnoli con le fiere che si fanno in Toscana e con le solite genealogie.
A curious and very rare almanack for 1855, containing, inter alia, a bitter dispute between a pumpkin and a turnip, a condemnation of avarice, and global population statistics.
The seventeenth-century astrologer Sesto Caio Baccelli lent his name to a series of popular nineteenth-century Tuscan almanacks, several of them printed by Giovanni Formigli in Florence. Antonio Guadagnoli (1798–1858) contributed humorous poems and prefaces to the Sesto Caio Baccelli from 1832 to 1854, when Formigli advanced the title to Settimo Caio Baccelli, perhaps to distinguish his publications from similar Florentine publications of the time.
The almanack includes overviews of the four seasons and zodiacal woodcuts for the months with often-ominous horoscopes: April promises pleasant weather, but warns that gambling tears apart families and will result in the downfall of society, and in August one should avoid consuming unripe fruits and maintain high standards of personal hygiene to avoid the spread of cholera. It is prefaced by an unusual essay on greed and its consequences (melancholy, madness, and, in extreme cases, suicide), citing Voltaire, Montesquieu, and St Paul; statistics on the population and area of the world’s nations, with a separate table for the regions of Italy (totalling 27,713,000 inhabitants, but excluding ’40,000 Israeliti, e 24,000 riformati Greci non uniti’); and Guadagnoli’s humorous poem on the tumultuous relationship between a rather haughty pumpkin and an embittered turnip which appears here for the first time.
Not on OCLC or Library Hub. ICCU finds a single copy in Italy, at Pisa.
