Ada Boni - Il talismano della felicità - 1925

The Talisman of Happiness is a manual and cookbook of Italian cuisine written by Ada Boni (Rome, October 11, 1881 – Rome, May 2, 1973) and published in 1925 by the Carlo Colombo publishing house in Rome.

Ada Boni (1881–1973) was a celebrated gastronome, journalist, and Italian writer, considered one of the pioneers of domestic cooking in our country.

The auctioned volume (box set) was printed in 1981 in ROME/100 years since the author’s birth.

Editions (source: Wikipedia)
• Ada Boni, The Talisman of Happiness, 1st ed., Colombo, 1925.
• Ada Boni, The Talisman of Happiness, 2nd (significantly expanded) ed., Rome, Edizioni della Rivista Preziosa. award-winning at the International Exhibition of Domestic Economy (Rome, 1927)
• Ada Boni, The Talisman of Happiness, 3rd (completely revised and expanded) ed., Rome, Edizione della Rivista Preziosa SS Apostoli Roma, 1931.
• Ada Boni, The Talisman of Happiness, 4th (completely revised and expanded) ed., Edizioni della Rivista Preziosa, 1934.
• Ada Boni, The Talisman of Happiness, Novara, Tip. Ist. Geogr. De Agostini, Domus, 1946.
• Ada Boni, The Talisman of Happiness, 19th ed., Rome, C. Colombo, 1949.
• Ada Boni, The Talisman of Happiness, 20th ed., Rome, Carlo Colombo, 1951.
• Ada Boni, The Talisman of Happiness, 23rd ed., Rome, Colombo, 1954.
• Ada Boni, The Talisman of Happiness, Publisher Colombo, 1972 (box set).
• Ada Boni, The Talisman of Happiness, Rome, Colombo, 1973.
• Ada Boni, The Talisman of Happiness, Rome, Colombo, 1974.
• Ada Boni, The Talisman of Happiness, House Publisher Carlo Colombo, 1988 (box set).
• Ada Boni, The Talisman of Happiness, Colombo, 1999.
• Ada Boni, The Talisman of Happiness, Colombo, 2000.
• Ada Boni, The Talisman of Happiness, Colombo, 2006.
• Ada Boni, The Talisman of Happiness, Colombo, 2007.

Dimensions 25x18x8.5 cm.
Weight 2.350 kg.

For a hundred years, every Italian kitchen has featured a well-worn volume: Ada Boni’s The Talisman of Happiness.
With The Bean Eater by Annibale Carracci on the cover, the book that never goes out of fashion has shaped generations of home cooks, offering recipes, advice, and a model of everyday cooking that is also an assertion of identity. Over the century, The Talisman has never been out of print, selling over one million copies.

Now, to demonstrate the importance of this book, this text, written for the Italian audience a century ago, has crossed the Atlantic in a complete English translation. An editorial undertaking born of years of research and trial: The New York Times called it “a near-maniacal mission.” At the century mark, in 2025, the first complete English translation of The Talisman of Happiness was released in the United States, with 1,680 recipes faithfully rendered in English, accompanied by converted measures and commentary aimed at preserving the original spirit.
The Talisman of Happiness: The Most Iconic Italian Cookbook Ever Written
edited by Michael Szczerban, director of the Voracious series at Little, Brown & Company, who spent twelve years securing rights and bringing the original work back to the international public.
“There were years of irrational behavior and pure obsession,” Szczerban told The New York Times.
The original edition has been praised by, for example, chef Lidia Bastianich, who wrote its foreword.