Beschreibung:

FORTUNIO, Giovanni Francesco (1460?-1520?). Regole grammaticali della volgar lingua . Ancona: Bernardino Guerraldus, of Vercelli, September 1516. 4° (203 x 137 mm). Collation: a 4 A-D 4 E 6 F-G 4 H 6 (a1r title, a1v blank, a2r author's preface "to the students of the vernacular", a4v blank, A1r text, H6r colophon and errata, H6v blank). 40 leaves. Italic type. (Title lightly soiled and marginally foxed, occasional minor marginal soiling or staining.) 19th-century paper wrappers. Provenance : "Delluogo di Cappuc. . . Quambonus", contemporary calligraphic inscription on title; Rome, Library of the Jesuits ("Bibl. Dom. Prof. Rom."), 18th-century inkstamp on title. FIRST EDITION OF THE FIRST PRINTED ITALIAN GRAMMAR, an important work in the establishment of the Tuscan dialect as the standard vernacular. Giovanni Francesco Fortunio, not himself an Italian but a native of Zara in Dalmatia who had settled in Venice as a jurist and became mayor of Ancona, based his rules of Italian grammar on the writing of the three great poets of the trecento , Dante, Boccaccio and Petrarch, all Florentines writing in the Tuscan dialect. Fortunio's grammar complemented the work of Pietro Bembo, the most influential of the 16th-century proponents of the superiority of the Tuscan vernacular, whose 1525 Prose della volgar lingua set forth these principles through a detailed analysis of the language of the fourteenth-century poets. Fortunio's grammar enjoyed great popularity and was frequently reprinted during the next four decades. The printer Bernardinus Guerraldus of Vercelli, the second printer of Ancona, practiced briefly in Venice in 1502 before moving to Ancona, where he appeared in 1513, taking over the press and material of Bernardinus Oliva. This was the ninth book from Guerraldus's Ancona press, and the twelfth book printed in that city. Adams F-792; BM/STC Italian , p. 274; Gamba 1400; Norton, Italian Printers , p. 2.