PRINTED IN LIVORNO FOR ENGLISH EXPATRIATES
GOLDONI, Carlo.
Scelta di alcune commedie. Per uso de’ dilettanti della lingua italiana. Prima edizione italiana.
Livorno, Assunto Barbani, 1816.
Two volumes bound in one, 16mo, pp. xv, [1], 439, [1]; 478; without the half-title to volume II; some light scattered foxing, but overall a very good copy, elegantly bound in contemporary blue polished calf, spine in compartments decorated gilt, red morocco lettering-piece; ownership inscription of E. Skyring to first half-title, dated 18 May 1820.
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Scelta di alcune commedie. Per uso de’ dilettanti della lingua italiana. Prima edizione italiana.
First edition printed in Italy of a collection of ten comedies by Goldoni, selected for their lack of complicated syntax and lack of Venetian dialect and idioms, published in Livorno for the benefit of the English community.
In the seventeenth century Livorno emerged as an archetypal free port, a safe and neutral entrepôt controlled by the Medici Dukes of Tuscany. By the 1640s the English were the principal foreign mercantile population, and in the eighteenth century perhaps half the city’s trade went through them. The present edition, simplified for the benefit of students of Italian, is much enlarged compared to the previous Paris editions edited by Luigi Pio, which included only six comedies. Included in this selection are ‘Pamela’, ‘Il vero amico’, ‘L’avventuriere onorato’, ‘Le smanie per la villeggiatura’, ‘L’osteria della posta’, ‘Il burbero benefico, o sia, il bisbetico di buon cuore’, ‘Pamela maritata’, ‘La dama prudente’, ‘Il padre di famiglia’, and ‘Il cavaliere e la dama’.
The printer Assunto Barbani had published, in the same year, the first Italian translation of Ann Radliffe’s Gothic novel Udolpho.
OCLC finds only two copies in the US (Boston Athenaeum and Dartmouth) and five in the UK (BL, Exeter, Leeds, NLS, Ushaw College). We find no copies on OPAC SBN.
