A PILGRIMAGE TO THE HOLY LAND
PESENTI, Giovanni Paolo.
Pellegrinaggio di Gierusalemme fatto, e descritto per Gio. Paolo Pesenti.
Bergamo, Comin Ventura, 1615.
4to, pp. [xvi], 167, [1, blank]; title within woodcut architectural border incorporating woodcut printer’s device, woodcut initials, head- and tailpieces; slight dampstain to pp. [vii–viii], else a very good copy with wide margins; bound in contemporary vellum over carta rustica, stubs from two pairs of red silk ties, tail-edges lettered in ink ‘Pellegrinag: di: Gerusal:’, sewn on 3 tawed thongs; vellum removed from front board and spine; old ink inscription excised from front free endpaper.
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Pellegrinaggio di Gierusalemme fatto, e descritto per Gio. Paolo Pesenti.
First edition of Pesenti’s account of his journey from Venice to Alexandria, across Syria to Jerusalem, and through the Egyptian desert before sailing home via Sicily.
Pesenti (1579–1658), from a rich Bergamo family of cloth merchants, undertook his pilgrimage to the Holy Land between 4 September 1612 and 31 August 1613. He became a knight of one of the four religious military orders established in the medieval period to protect Christian pilgrims from harm; by Pesenti’s time, the Order of the Holy Sepulchre had specific responsibility for the care of the Holy Sepulchre itself.
The narrative is arranged in three books. First, Pesenti describes his preparations for the journey and the voyage by sea from Venice down the Adriatic and across to Alexandria, then the journey overland to Aleppo, Damascus, and Jerusalem. The second book contains details of Jerusalem and the Holy Sepulchre, as well as travels in the surrounding areas. The third returns to Egypt, describing Cairo and the Nile, before embarking on a ship to Sicily (which is chased by corsairs off the southern tip of Sardinia) and travelling back to Bergamo via Rome and Loreto.
His account of the Holy Sepulchre indicates how its care was divided at the time between the different Christian denominations: the Greeks had the whole of the choir and the place where Jesus was imprisoned, the Georgians the part of Mount Calvary where the Cross was placed, the Armenians the chapel of St Helena, the Ethiopians the column of the flagellation, and the Syrians maintained the lamp above the spot where Mary stood by the Cross (pp. 80–81). His account is dedicated to Giambattista Milani, the (very elderly) bishop of Bergamo, and was reprinted in Brescia in 1628.
A portrait of Pesenti wearing the insignia of the Knights of the Holy Sepulchre, made by Carlo Ceresa in around 1650, survives in a collection in Bergamo.
The removal of part of the binding cover enables an unusually close examination of a typical Italian binding’s structure, with the three tawed sewing supports cut at the joints and only the endband cores laced in (through the vellum only, the boards having been cut); the spine is lined with transverse vellum strips between the sewing supports, pasted inside the boards under the pastedowns.
Extremely rare: outside Italy we find two in the UK (BL and Bodley), one in Paris at the BNF, and one in Qatar; no copies in the US. We have found just one previous auction record, from 1999.
USTC 4025044.
