Rare 16th-century Italian edition of the world's first best-selling travel book.

Although largely fictitious, the journeys are based upon travellers' tales extant in the fourteenth century and as such are of considerable interest. Purchas considered Sir John Mandeville to be akin to Marco Polo in terms of importance 'the greatest Asian Traveller that ever the World had' (Pilgrimes III, p65). His travels take the reader through Turkey, Armenia, Persia, Tartary, Arabia, India and China, and gave many Europeans their first taste of the Near and Middle East, as well as the East Indies.

Little is known of Mandeville himself, however he claims to have been an English Knight who travelled between 1322 and 1356, serving under both the Sultan of Egypt and the Great Khan. Although traditionally attributed to Mandeville, in reality the work was an English version of a text known as Itinerarium, of which the original, ascribed to Jean d'Outremeuse, was probably written in Anglo-Norman French.

All pre-1725 editions of Mandeville are scarce, and editions such as this, in a vernacular language, particularly so. We can trace only 4 copies in institutional collections worldwide: 1 in the British Isles (BL), 1 in North America (Houghton Library, Harvard), and 2 in Italy (Biblioteca Regionale Universitaria, Messina, and Biblioteca Comunale Augusta, Perugia.

8vo; title within decorative woodcut border, 4-line decorative woodcut initial to A2, 2-line initials elsewhere, some toning and soiling, small repair to fore-edge of title, bookplate to front pastedown; later full vellum, gilt lettering to spine on brown morocco title-piece, minor worming to extremities and endpapers; collation: A-EE4; ff. [112].

USTC 839970.