Beschreibung:

STATUTA -- Statuti della città d'Ascoli . Ascoli Piceno: Giovanni da Teramo, 9 April 1496. Chancery 2° (298 x 227 mm). Collation: a-z \\i \\j 10 \\g 6 (a1r prefatory matter, a1v text, \\g4r colophon, \\g5-6 blank). 253 leaves (of 256, without a1 and the two final blanks); on guards throughout (carefully preserving marginalia). 30 lines, double column. Type 148G. 2-line spaces for initials, printed guide letters from quire i on. (First 8 leaves with heavy marginal restoration, causing loss to letters of about 10 words, quire a misbound (a4-9 a2-3 b1-10 a10 c1 etc.), fol. z1 torn and repaired with no loss to text, 5 or 6 small marginal repaired tears, dampstaining to last quire causing paper damage at head with partial loss to 4 letters of last 2 leaves, some soiling, foxing and staining.) Modern vellum over flexible boards, two pairs of tawed leather ties, earlier paste-down endpapers preserved. Provenance : copiously annotated with interpretations and commentary in Latin by several 16th- or 17th-century hands (some cropped), occasional later marginalia in Italian, running-titles supplied in an 18th-century hand; "Ad usum mei Francisci Mariae Cappelletti Asculani Anno Domini 1778", inscription on front pastedown; Malvezzi de' Medici, Bologna, library shelfmark label stamped 145 on front pastedown. FIRST EDITION, ONE OF EIGHT KNOWN COPIES, THE ONLY EXTANT PRODUCTION OF THIS PRESS, AND ONE OF ONLY TWO BOOKS PRINTED AT ASCOLI PICENO IN THE FIFTEENTH CENTURY. The date of the ratification of the statutes is given in the preamble of this edition (on a1, lacking from this copy) as 1387, a misprint for 1377. No manuscript is known to survive of the statutes of Ascoli Piceno, making the printed edition the earliest extant source of the laws and statutes regulating the affairs of this small town of the northern Abruzzi during the later fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Little is known of the printer Giovanni da Teramo, a Franciscan friar, other than that he carried out the printing of the statutes on the premises of the monastery of Santa Maria di Solestano, by official order of the local authorites, who permitted him to bring in for the purpose fellow brothers of his order. They made the monastery their permanent home after the printing was finished, until they were chased out of town in 1545 for criminal behavior (a manuscript chronicle in the Biblioteca Communale of Ascoli [ms. 7] states that a group of the brothers attacked and killed a young girl who was visiting with her mother). Da Teramo's choice of a very large gothic rotunda typeface, derived from an Italian book hand current in the second half of the previous century and a striking oddity in Italian printing of this period, can evidently be attributed to the wish of the authorites to make the printed version of the statutes resemble as much as possible its manuscript model. The thoroughly anachronistic fount most clearly resembles types used by printers in Rome and Perugia over 20 years earlier (cf. Han type 125G and Vydenast 103G). The only copy held by an institution outside of Italy is the British Library copy; within Italy, six copies are recorded (Ascoli Piceno, Biblioteca del Senato, Florence Biblioteca Nazionale, Vatican (2 copies), and Falconara Franc [?] (imperfect). The only other Ascoli incunable, a Chronicle of Saint Isidore, printed by another otherwise unrecorded printer in 1477 (Hain 9307), is known in only one copy, at the Bibliothèque Nationale. H 14995; BMC VII, 1075 (IB. 33152); Fumagalli Lexicon , pp. 16-18; Luigi Manzoni, Bibliografia degli statuti, ordini, e leggi dei municipali italiana (Bologna 1876) I: 31.