Simona Inserra (University of Catania, Italy)
A miscellany composed of 14 works printed between 1526 and 1619 in Italy (except for one printed in Basel), helded in Montecassino Abbey’s Library, Italy, contains some imprints of Secrets and of Sententious and ridiculous things, a printed production that could be defined as “ephemera”, intended to be quickly used and to disappear. Two booklets in this Italian miscellany were owned by Marzio Milesi, a great bibliophile in Rome, friend of the famous artist Caravaggio and author of his epigraphs.
The paper aims to give an in-depth analysis, on one hand, about this kind of printed books, widespread between the end of the sixteenth and the first decades of the seventeeth century, rarely survived if not bound in miscellany, and, on the other hand, on the figure of the Roman bibliophile Milesi and the cultural environment in which he was immersed and with whom he shared his knowledge; significant is the ownership’s note: Marti Milesii sum et amicorum, which gives the sense of a private library open to the owner’s friends.