Venetian pages, Italian culture

In the history of printing, as early as the “experimental” period of the incunabula, Venice could lay claim to the title of the European capital of the book. Its role as the Athens of the “miraculous procedure” was due to a prolifi c combination of entrepreneurial capabilities enabling the city to take on a twofold role: fi rst, as a centre of production and market for the new product, and second, in cultural terms since, as the ideal heir to Petrarch’s intellectual and moral views, it developed a culture based on the primacy of philology as the indispensable preliminary tool for all disciplines, both literary and scientific.

In Venice, the book was conceived as a “useful and honourable merchandise”, a support and medium for cultural messages. At the same time, however, it was a commodity and source of wealth. The glorious but by then increasingly less travelled “spice route” was replaced by a great new network that was to stretch throughout Europe and from West to East. The history of the 16th-century Italian book thus basically coincides with – and in practice consists of – the history of book production in Venice. Books printed in the Republic were distributed on a widespread scale to satisfy a truly national demand: i.e. they were bought and read in the whole of Italy, from Piedmont to Sicily. The need to meet the requirements for universality in book production led to the adoption of a “common” artifi cial language for books and it was created from the model of literary Tuscan.

This linguistic revolution based on the identifi cation of a vernacular as the national linguistic form took hold in Venice much earlier than similar processes in other European countries. To sum up the phenomenon in a phrase: “Tuscan language, Venetian books, Italian culture”.

The selection of books on show for the offi cial opening of the New Manica Lunga is thus meant to represent Venetian publishing and therefore also Italian culture as a whole.