Corradini, Pietro Marcellino
De primis antiqui Latii populis, urbibus, regibus, moribus, & festis ; quibus accessit Setina, et Circejensis historia libri tres in duos tomos distincti.
Roma, Bernabo & Lazzarini 1748.
Full Description
4to. 2 vols. (4) + 407 + (1) + xxxii pp ; (4) + 277 + (1) + xxxiii + (1)pp. Contemporary full mottled calf, with gilt stamped arms of an eighteenth century German bishop on upper and lower covers of each volume. Slightly worn at heads and foots of spines and at outer margins, but a good, clean set otherwise.
A new printing of the two original volumes, first published in 1704-5, of what was to become a ten-volume history of “Vetus Latium”, the ancient kingdom of Latium, roughly co-terminous with the modern Italian region of Lazio. The importance of these two volumes, of which the first deals with the general history of Latium before it was absorbed into the territory of the Roman state proper, and the second with the early history of the town of Sezze and its surrounding district, is that these were the only volumes of the ten volumes eventually published that were personally written by Corradini (1658-1743), the remaining eight volumes being the work of Giuseppe Rocco Volpi, a Jesuit priest, and appearing at intervals between 1726 and 1745. Corradini, later a Cardinal and a prominent figure at the papal court, had himself been born at Sezze, a town on the Appian Way between Rome and Naples, and his full illustrated account of the history and antiquities of Sezze and its vicinity, occupying much of the second volume, shows his grasp of the literary and inscriptional evidence for the history of the area in the pre-Christian period. By 1748 the original printings of these volumes were evidently out of print, and this new edition of them both supplied a need and served to assert Corradini’s independent role as their author (no reference is made in either volume to the subsequent Vetus Latium volumes by Volpi).