Nardi (Jacopo)
Florence 1476 – 1563 Venice

Le storie della citta di Firenze… Doue con tutte particolarità̀, che si possono disiderare si contiene cio che dall’anno 1494. fino all’anno 1531. è successo. Con la Tauola della cose Notabili, e co’ Sommari à ciascun libro[.] Aggiuntoui vn’ istruzione per leggere le storie ordinatamente.

Florence, Bartolomeo Sermartelli, 1584

quarto (210 mm), (212) ff., signed a⁸ A-Z⁸ Aa-Bb⁸ Cc⁴ and paginated (16) 1-390 (18), woodcut of Medici insignia on title-page (printed in black), beneath Cardinal’s hat (printed in red); woodcut initials.

provenance early ink stamp of a member of the Martelli family of Florence, in lower margin of title-page; engraved armorial exlibris of the Martelli family (motto ‘Sola virtus vera nobilitas’ in a banderol), pasted to free-endpaper.¹

Margins of the title-page reinforced at an early date, occasional spotting, but overall in good state of preservation.

In an Italian 18th century half-calf binding, patterned endpapers, painted pages edges.

Second edition of Nardi’s chief work, an account of the previous century of Florentine history from the standpoint of the defeated Savonarolian republicans. The author was descended from an old patrician family, traditionally anti-Medicean. He had been active in both political and literary life in Florence, serving on the Signoria (1509) and on the Sedici Gonfalonieri (in 1512, 1519, 1522, 1527), writing plays and poetry, and the programmes for festive triumphs.² After sentenced to exile, in 1533, he settled in Venice, where he became a free-lance writer of political and historical works in favour of the re-establishment of a republican constitution.

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By most accounts, Nardi commenced writing the present work in 1552 or 1553.³ It remained in manuscript at the time of his death, with the tenth and final book incomplete, and a testamentary instruction that the manuscript be burned.⁴ The first edition was published in Lyon by Ancelin, in 1582, dedicated by its editor, the Florentine theologian, Francesco Giuntini, a religious exile in Lyon, to Niccolò Arrighi. A second edition followed at Florence two years later, testimony to the new freedom of speech then prevailing in Florence, and extended by Ferdinando i. Both editions print Books i–ix only; the fragmentary Book x was first printed in 1842.⁵

Our copy of the second edition bears on its title-page the black ink ownership stamp of an unidentified member of the Martelli family; the family exlibris is pasted to an endpaper. The copy presumably was supplied directly by the printer, Bartolomeo de’ Libri, son of the printer Michelagnolo de’ Libri, who for commercial reasons had adopted the name of his patrons, the Martelli family.⁶ ‘Bartolomeo Sermartelli’ dedicates the book (4 April 1584) to Alessandro Ottaviano de’ Medici, Archbishop of Florence, drawing attention to his recent elevation into the cardinalate (12 December 1583) on the title-page.

references Domenico Moreni, Bibliografia storico-ragionata della Toscana, o sia Catalogo degli scrittori che hanno illustrata la storia delle città, luoghi, e persone della medesima (Florence 1805), ii, pp.108–109; Bartolommeo Gamba, Serie dei Testi di Lingua e di altre opere importanti nella Italiana letteratura scritte dal secolo xiv al xix (Venice 1839), pp.449–450; Edit 16, CNCE 33723