{"product_id":"vettori-piero-trattato-delle-lodi-et-della-coltivatione-de-gl-ulivi","title":"VETTORI, Piero Trattato … delle lodi et della coltivatione de gl’ulivi.","description":"\u003ch3 style=\"font-variant: small-caps\"\u003eOde to Olives\u003c\/h3\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eVETTORI, Piero\u003c\/strong\u003e Trattato … delle lodi et della coltivatione de gl’ulivi. \u003ci\u003eFlorence:\u003c\/i\u003e [\u003ci\u003eFilippo\u003c\/i\u003e] \u003ci\u003eGiunti\u003c\/i\u003e [\u003ci\u003ee fratelli\u003c\/i\u003e]. 1569.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e8vo in 4s. Nineteenth-century vellum over boards, green gilt morocco lettering-piece to spine; pp. [viii], 89, [1 (blank)]; woodcut Giunta device to title, 7- and 8-line woodcut initials; minute wormhole to spine and to lower joint at foot; small repair to lower corner of final (blank) leaf, head of title slightly dusty, old marginal repair to f. G2 not affecting text; a very good copy; nineteenth-century bookplate of Vincenzo Follini to front pastedown (\u003ci\u003esee below\u003c\/i\u003e), nineteenth-century ownership inscription ‘D. Alexandri Belli Abbatij Cassinensis’ to title; sporadic early underlining.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eFirst edition of the first specific work on olives and their cultivation, dedicated to the author’s patron, Cosimo I de’ Medici, this copy from the librarian of the Magliabechiana Library.\u003c\/strong\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eFlorentine humanist, philologist, and Giunta editor Piero Vettori (1499–1585) was a friend of Benedetto Varchi and Giovanni della Casa, editing the latter’s works after his death. At the age of eighteen, he married Maddalena Costanza de’ Medici (d. 1566), and despite his early involvement with Luigi Alamanni and Iacopo Cattani da Diacceto – members of the Orti Oricellari circle implicated in the 1522 conspiracy to kill Cardinal Giuliano de’ Medici – he remained close to the Medici family, later giving funeral orations for Cardinal Giovanni de’ Medici (1562); the dedicatee of this work, Cosimo I de’ Medici (1574); and the Grand Duke’s wife, Eleonora di Toledo (1562). In 1530, he left Florence for his country home at San Casciano in Val di Pesa (famously the site of Machiavelli’s exile), likely where he gathered firsthand encounters with olive cultivation. He remained there until he was recalled to Florence by Cosimo I de’ Medici in 1538\/39 to take up a position as lecturer in Greek and Latin.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eHe continued teaching in Florence until 1584 ‘despite the offers he received over the years […] and the concrete possibility of entering the Roman Curia in 1555 following the election of Marcello Cervini (Pope Marcellus II), a lover of classical languages and a personal friend of Vettori’s whose pontificate lasted only a few weeks’ (\u003ci\u003eDBI, trans.\u003c\/i\u003e). He edited numerous classical works for the Giunta press, notably the 1536 edition of Cicero’s \u003ci\u003eEpistolae familiares\u003c\/i\u003e, and he was involved in the 1527 ‘\u003ci\u003eventisettana\u003c\/i\u003e’ edition of the \u003ci\u003eDecameron\u003c\/i\u003e; Renouard calls him ‘the most knowledgeable of all [Giunta] editors’ (\u003ci\u003etrans.\u003c\/i\u003e)\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eNumerous works by or edited by Vettori were dedicated to Cosimo I de’ Medici: here, he remarks that the Grand Duke is particularly apt as a dedicatee for having been the driving force behind much of his literary output. Cosimo ‘not only engaged with agronomy on a theoretical level, but he also took up the manual aspects with the sincerity of Cincinnatus’, planting a rose garden near Palazzo Pitti, planting peach pits in his garden at Poggio a Caiano, and creating a garden of dwarf fruit trees (Barker, p. 533). In his dedication, Vettori writes that Cosimo ‘does not in any way scorn the cultivation of the land, nor see it as a squalid thing unworthy of [his] station to handle the plants with [his] hands on occasion and to take great care that they are well placed and that each is arranged with respect to the others’ (pp. [v]–[vi], \u003ci\u003etrans.\u003c\/i\u003e Barker, pp. 533–34). Here, Vettori draws extensively on practices of olive cultivation in antiquity to elucidate the many benefits of olives and olive oil, making reference to the works of Sophocles, Virgil, and Polybius, amongst others. He is personally indebted to the mind-sharpening capacities of olive oil, writing that he had consumed vast amounts during his studies of literature ‘and received great benefit from it’.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eVettori describes, \u003ci\u003einter alia\u003c\/i\u003e, soldiers and athletes oiling their bodies, the use of olive oil in spinning wool, and its benefit as a health drink (providing an anecdote on Demosthenes having consumed more olive oil than wine in his lifetime), as well as the high commercial value of olive trees, different modes of pruning olive trees (including a method of utilising cuttings ‘which I have not read in the works of any author, but which has been thought of and discovered by me’, p. 48, \u003ci\u003etrans.\u003c\/i\u003e), the olive branch as a symbol of peace, how to consume olives (including olives marinated with lemon or cedar leaves), and Tuscan olive varieties, with local variants of their names.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eLater editions were frequently published with the \u003ci\u003eColtivazione toscana delle viti\u003c\/i\u003e of Davanzati and Soderini.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003ci\u003eProvenance:\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e1.  Bookplate of Vincenzo Follini (1759–1836), librarian of the Biblioteca Magliabechiana in Florence. The collection stemmed from thirty thousand volumes bequeathed to the city of Florence by seventeenth-century bibliophile Antonio Magliabechi, librarian to Cosimo III de’ Medici. The Magliabechiana, subsequently housed at the Uffizi and opened to the public in 1747, merged with the Biblioteca Palatina in 1861 to form what is now the National Central Library of Florence.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e2.  Nineteenth-century ownership inscription of Abbot Alessandro Belli, a member of the Cassinese congregation of the Benedictine Order; he was prior of S. Maria della Badia in Florence and later abbot of the Monastery of S. Domenico in Siena.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003ci\u003eBM STC Italian, p. 723; EDIT16 CNCE 28884; USTC 863120; Brunet V, col. 1180; Gamba 1024n; Graesse VII, p. 302; Pritzel 10727. Not in Adams or Bitting (cf. p. 431). See Moretti, p. 312; Renouard, p. xii ; Barker, ‘Cosimo I de’ Medici and the Renaissance Sciences’, in A Companion to Cosimo I de’ Medici (2022).\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eSKU: \u003c\/strong\u003e2125230\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Henry Sotheran Limited","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":64039912309113,"sku":"2125230","price":2000.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0045\/2178\/7426\/files\/2125230b.jpg?v=1784817252","url":"https:\/\/sotherans.co.uk\/products\/vettori-piero-trattato-delle-lodi-et-della-coltivatione-de-gl-ulivi","provider":"Sotherans","version":"1.0","type":"link"}