Caio Giulio Cesare - Commentarii - 1548

A rare and precious sixteenth-century edition of Caeser's Commentaries, printed in Venice by the renowned typographic workshop of Giovanni Gryphius, whose frontispiece bears the classic editorial device of the winged griffin with the motto Virtute duce, comite fortuna. The work gathers the fundamental historical and military texts of the Roman writer and general, including De Bello Gallico, De Bello Civili, and the commentaries on campaigns in Alexandria, Africa, and Spain, accompanied by rich analytical and toponymical indexes curated by scholars such as Raimondo Marliani to explain the ancient and modern names of cities, regions, and peoples. The book is distinguished by a refined iconographic woodcut apparatus consisting of historical maps of Gaul, the Italian peninsula, Spain, and Germany, technical illustrations dedicated to fortifications and siege engines, and decorated initials. Housed in a contemporary parchment stiff cover marked by pen tests and handwritten notes on the boards and spine, the volume preserves on the flyleaves the fascinating testimony of its nineteenth-century belonging to Guerriero Vecchietti, a pupil of the Convitto Nazionale di Fermo on 16 January 1880. The copy, although subjected to a conservative restoration intervention, shows a substantial structural lacuna in the loss of De Bello Gallico and of some pages at the height of Book I of De Bello Civili, which occurred before the recovery operations in the eighteenth century.
See digitized copy ICCU.
It presents 500 pages, of which 240 are numbered and 7 plates.