University of Virginia Library

The First Book Printed at Bari: Additional Notes by Dennis E. Rhodes

I am now able to add a few corrections and details to my earlier account of the book printed at Bari in 1535 which may not be without interest for the historian of printing in Italy.[1]

(a) The author

There is in the British Museum a smaller collection of poems which Niccolò Antonio Carmignano published under his own name in 1516: Le Cose vulgare de Missere Colantonio Carmignano. . . nouamente impresse, completed by Georgio di Rusconi at Venice on 23 December 1516. Since the majority of these poems are to be found in the Operette of 'Il Suavio Parthenopeo' printed at Bari in 1535, it is, after all, the author himself who discloses his identity and explains his pseudonym. The only portion of the 1535 book which is not to be found in the earlier Venice edition is the

central part addressed to Donna Isabella de Aragonia, Duchess of Milan and Bari, which deals with Queen Bona Sforza and her departure for Poland. More sonnets and eclogues were added, and these one presumes were not written until after 1516. One of the characters in the third and fourth of the four eclogues is called Suavio in both editions: thus by 1516 Carmignano had already thought of the name which he was to use as his pseudonym nearly twenty years later. The two books end with an epistle, ten sonnets, and a poem on the Crucifixion, but the Bari edition adds two or three pages of new poems to the Virgin Mary. On the whole, however, it is in the first half an almost page-for-page reprint of the Venice edition.

This discovery was in fact made forty years ago in an exhaustive article by Giovanni Rosalba in a periodical which for no good reason is not available in the British Isles.[2] I had an opportunity to consult it during a recent visit to Florence.

(b) The printer

The Manzoni—Fairfax Murray copy of the Operette having come up in a recent Paris sale-catalogue, a new possibility concerning the place of origin of Gillibert Nehou may now be surmised. Here it is stated that "l'imprimeur, Gilbert Nehou, ou de Néhou (?), devait être, selon toute probabilité, un normand des environs de Valognes".[3] In fact there is in Normandy, near Valognes on the Cherbourg peninsula, a small villlage named Néhou, from which the printer's family presumably took their name. But there is unfortunately no mention of Gillibert in the only book devoted to this parish, M.J.E. Lebredonchel's Histoire de la paroisse de Néhou, depuis les tems les plus reculés jusqu'à nos jours (Cherbourg, 1835).

Notes