THE ABC OF PIETY
[PRIMER.]
Abbecedario per imparar facilmente a sillabicare, coll’aggiunta di varie orazioni ad uso delle scuole.
Turin, Giacinto Marietti, [c. 1840?].
16mo, pp. 52; pp. 3-30 in large print; occasional light foxing a good copy in contemporary brown wrappers, edges speckled blue; a few small stains to front wrapper; contemporary ownership juvenile ink inscription ‘Per Macchione Umberto’ to front wrapper.
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Abbecedario per imparar facilmente a sillabicare, coll’aggiunta di varie orazioni ad uso delle scuole.
A seemingly unrecorded Torino-printed primer, with a series of syllabised phrases on devotion and morality.
The Abbecedario presents the alphabet along with diphthongs and triphthongs commonly used in Italian, followed by a series of ‘istruzioni particolari pei fanciulli’ divided into syllables for clear enunciation. The forty phrases in question instruct children not to tarry on their way home from school, to kiss the hands of their elders, to remove their hats if they should pass a cross or an image of Christ or the Madonna, and to wash their hands before mealtimes, &c. ‘In, som-ma, tut-te, le, vo-stre, cu-re, prin-ci-pa-li, e, vostri, de-si-de-rj, men-tre, vi-ve-te, in, que-sto, mon-do, de-vo-no, ten-de-re, a, ren-der-vi, gra-to, al, Si-gno-re, ed, a, non, of-fen-der-lo, ma-i, ac-cioc-chè, do-po, que-sta, vi-ta, mor-ta-le, vo-i, pos-sia-te, e-vi-tare, l’In-fer-no, e, me-ri-ta-re, il, Paradiso’ (p. 28).
Also included are several useful prayers (without syllabification), among them the Lord’s Prayer, the Hail Mary, the Apostles’ Creed, and an order of service for mass (pp. 41-7), as well as multiplication tables and a conversion table for units of measurement used in Piedmont. The piede liprando (approximately half a metre), divided into twelve oncie, was used in Turin (and elsewhere in the Kingdom of Sardinia) until the adoption of the metric system in the early 1840s.
We have traced no copies on OCLC, Library Hub, or ICCU. ICCU finds a single copy of similarly titled Abbecedario con sillabe per imparare facilmente a sillabicare prima di leggere: coll’aggiunta di varie orazioni (Turin, G.B. Paravia, 1837, 52 pp.).
