Product Details

Rare 1598 Orvieto edition of Della famosissima Compagnia della Lesina, a famous Italian Renaissance satire about a fictional brotherhood devoted to extreme thrift and penny-pinching. Its emblem is the lesina, a shoemaker’s awl, which became associated in Italian with stinginess and gave rise to the verb lesinare — to scrimp or stint. Printed in Orvieto by Antonio Colaldi and Ventura Aquilini, this scarce third and final 16th-century edition is complete at 103, [1] pages. Features the striking title-page awl emblem, decorative woodcuts, the official roster of the mock society, and early manuscript ownership/use marks. Later antiquarian half-vellum binding over patterned-paper boards; attractive and sound. A remarkable 428-year-old artifact of Italian satire, language history, and regional printing