[Marco Polo] Ramusio - Secondo volume delle navigationi et viaggi - 1574/1574

Secondo volume delle navigationi et viaggi

In Venetia : Nella Stamperia de Givnti, l'anno MDLXXIIII [1574]

Complete. No binding. Last leaf damaged without loss of text. Pages partly dog-eared. A few pages browned.

Giovanni Battista Ramusio was an Italian geographer who compiled an important collection of travel writings, Delle navigationi et viaggi (1550–59; “Some Voyages and Travels”).

During Ramusio’s lifetime, the first volume (1550, 405 folio), and the third volume (1556, 455 folios) were published.

BUT RAMUSIO WAS NOT ONLY A MERE COMPILER of travel books. Searching in the Venetian archives, he found unknown manuscripts of Marco Polo.

The second volume, was published posthumously (1559, 191 folios) and had NEVER maps.

What is not mentioned in the usual descriptions of his work is that this is the FIRST CRITICAL EDITION of Marco Polo’s texts. Since Ramusio was in search of additional materials to be incorporate in the work publication was delayed. He tell us that for many years, the stories of Marco Polo had been deemed a fairy tale, and that he wished to purge the text of its many errors, and to offer to the public a critical edition based on several manuscripts.

So two years after his death the second volume was finally published. Up to this day, Ramusio texts of Marco Polo contains many passages not found in other texts.

In 1574 another enlarged edition (248 folios) was published with other travelogues added.

This is your change to own an extremely important text. The book is complete, (it never had maps like the others), it has beautiful initials and contains a beautiful woodcut of the rhubarb that Marco Polo had seen on his travels in China. The accounts of both Venetians have been considered important sources for what was one of the most desired medicinal products in Europe, culminating in a veritable rhubarb craze in the seventeenth centuries.

THIS BOOK contains

1. THE THREE BOOKS BY MARCO POLO.

2 The Flower of the Histories of the East, a historiographical work about the history of Asia, especially about the Muslim conquests and the Mongol invasion, 3. the work of Angiolello, Venetian adventurer, merchant. His narrative is essentially a first person chronicle of the political and military events in Persia from 1467 to 1524, 3. An account of the affairs of Muscovy wriiten by the Papal official named Alberto Campensé in 1524, Russia by the Italian physician, historian, and 4. Papal official Paolo Giovio (Pauli Jovii) together with rapports 5. by Baron Sigismund von Herberstein. 6. A letter to Aldus by Giorgio Interiano, a Genovese ethnographer and traveller, who returning from a journey to the Orient, published his Vita de' Zychi, chiamati Circassi. 7 Away from Venice. Piero Querini's incredible journey beyond the arctic circle in the 15th century. 8.The work ends with an account of the Isola Frislanda.