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Giuoco piacevole.

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First edition of an uncommon Renaissance collection of tales in prose and verse, set in the Lombard city of Brescia during the Carnival of the ‘prosperous and peaceful’ year 1566, employing the narrative frame canonised by Boccaccio in the Decameron, though with pointedly opposed features.

In the palace of Barbara Calini (a prominent aristocrat at the centre of the arts scene in Brescia, the dedicatee of a book of madrigals published by the musician Giovanni Contino and founder of the Accademia degli Occulti) eight noble guests enjoy a fine dinner and a dance; as a form of late-night entertainment, Barbara dismisses the idea of joining the city’s Carnival celebrations and opts for a game of stories instead. Each guest is called to improvise a tale in prose or verse; each tale must feature a series of elements (a city, an abode, a guest, a garden, a nymph, a tree, an animal, a bird singing a song) all starting with the same letter of the alphabet, and each guest is assigned a letter. The Giuoco piacevole is the first published work by Ascanio de’ Mori (c. 1533–1591), and ‘reflects all the fashions of court culture: the role of women, the topoi of amorous Platonism, the centrality of the word and of dialogues surrounding social norms, and the culture of emblems and imprese’ (DBI, trans.). A second edition, printed in 1580, changes the hostess from Barbara Calini to Beatrice Gambara, and a third followed in 1590.

We find three copies in the UK (BL, Bodleian, and Trinity College, Cambridge), and six in the US (Duke, Folger, Harvard, Huntington, UCLA, Yale).

BM STC Italian, p. 449; EDIT16 30259; USTC 843568; Adams M-1783; Graesse IV, p. 608; Olschki, Choix II 2610.

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