VALLE, Pierro della. [with] ROCCHI, Girolamo.

Sammelband, extra-illustrated C18 prints and original drawing, of two rare works in Italian, both first editions, the first containing the Italian traveller Pierro della Valle’s (1586-1652) description of the court of Shah Abbas of Persia, the greatest ruler of the Iranian Safavid Dynasty, the second an account of the funeral of della Valle’s Persian wife Sitti Maani, from Mardin in modern-day Turkey, with etchings of her arms and calligraphic sigil. The account of Shah Abbas’s court is the only description of della Valle’s travels to be published in his lifetime. An edition of the first appeared simultaneously in Rome, priority not established.                                                                                                          

The account of Shah Abbas’s court begins with the conflicts of language and etiquette experienced by Georgian, Russian, Turkish and Portuguese visitors to the court, descriptions of courtesans, the Shah’s menagerie, etc. Della Valle, who in general is extremely praiseworthy of Abbas and defends him from accusations of tyranny, describes his temperance and good rule, his adherence to Islamic law, including abstaining from alcohol and fasting during Ramadan, and tolerance of Christian communities. However, della Valle does not entirely shy away from the more tyrannical aspects of Abbas’s reign: the persecution of Jews and occasionally Armenian and Syrian Christians, and the extreme cruelty that Abbas displayed in punishing criminals. Della Valle reports disembowelment, removing of livers, blinding, cutting off feet and hands, castration, and people being fed to ferocious dogs. At the end is a genealogy of Abbas stretching back to Adam and the biblical patriarchs, with the prophet Muhammad appearing at number 13. 

Della Valle was an Italian composer who travelled extensively in the Middle East and Holy Land, Northern Africa and India, returning to Rome with valuable manuscripts and artefacts, as well as the mummified corpse of his Mesopotamian wife. In 1616 della Valle had travelled to Baghdad, crossing the Mesopotamian plain from Aleppo, in order to marry the Syrian Christian Sitti Maani Gioerida (Ma’ani Juwayri), daughter of a Catholic Nestorian father and Armenian mother; the engraved portrait at the front of the second work shows Maani in Syrian dress and was supposedly based on the painting, since lost, that had induced della Valle to marry her. Della Valle and his wife travelled together to the court of Shah Abbas of Persia, where he was a popular guest, this experience forming the basis for the first work. In 1621 he was considering returning to India, but while at the coast awaiting transport Maani died. Della Valle carried his wife’s mummified body in a lead-lined box for five years, including to India, before he was able to return to Rome in 1626, and the following year Maani was interred in the family tomb at Santa Maria in Ara Coeli as part of an elaborately staged funeral.

Maani’s funeral was arranged by della Valle with the Accademia degli Umoristi and was a grand performance of orientalism and Catholic proselytization. It contains Rocchi’s eulogy on Maani’s noble Mesopotamian origins and her virtues as a wife, portraying her both as an exotic foreigner but also as a devout ‘Chaldean’ Christian eager to become a Catholic; it was only five years since the establishment of the Sacra Congregatio de Propaganda Fide in 1622, which over the next few decades expressly sought to bring members of the so-called Eastern Church into the Catholic faith. There follows a description of a temporary funerary catafalque, which does not survive but is illustrated in the engraving by Scotin, on which were statues representing Maani’s virtues, beneath which appeared multilingual epitaphs in Latin, Syriac, Arabic, Turkish, Persian, Italian, Portuguese, French, Spanish, Armenian, and two in Greek, in deference to the many languages spoken by Maani, which made her so indispensable as a travelling companion to her husband; these are reproduced here in typographical facsimile. There follow a great many Latin epigraphs, poems and elegies to Maani by members of the Academy, and finally della Valle’s epitaph on his wife. ‘The Zanetti press was known for printing annual missionary reports from Ethiopia, China, and Japan, so it was the logical choice for the publication of such an ambitious multilingual work’ (Cristelle Baskins, Lost in Translation: Portraits of Sitti Maani Gioerida della Valle in Baroque Rome’ in Early Modern Women, 7 (2012), pp. 245-246).

We have traced several copies of the second work with a folding plate depicting Maani’s catafalque, though it is unclear whether this was issued in all copies; the same is the case with the engraved portrait of Maani.