Apparato all'historia di tutte le Nationi. Et il modo di studiare la geografia. Di Antonio Possevino Mantovano della Compagnia di Giesù. Prima in lingua latina uscito in luce nella stampa Vaticana Pontificia in Roma: dapoi accresciuto, e stampato in Venetia. Et nuovamente fatto italiano dall'istesso Auttore [...] Con una brieve summa dell'opera doppo l'epistola dedicatoria

8vo (159x103 mm). [24], 270, [1] leaves. Collation: a-c8 A-Ll8. Leaf Ll7, a blank, is present; l. Ll8, another blank, is missing. On the title page woodcut vignette with the monogram of Christ (initials I.H.S. surmounted by a cross) and, below, a heart with three nails in the radiant host. Roman and italic types. Woodcut decorated initials and ornaments. Several ownership inscriptions on the title page, mostly inked out and hardly readable, including “Ex libris D. Liborii Castaldo”. 19th-century quarter calf gilt, panels covered with marbled paper, sprinkled edges (slightly worn and rubbed). Some occasional light browning and staining, worm tracks skillfully repaired at the beginning and at the end of the volume only occasionally slightly touching the text.
First edition in Italian of this bibliographical schoolbook on the teaching of history and geography. “In order to extend the dissemination of the Bibliotheca selecta among a wider audience unfamiliar with Latin, the author decided to publish individual parts of the work in Italian translation, expanding the text in several places with informative notes and giving the volumes a more convenient format (in 4to and 8vo) to facilitate their use in schools: see, for example, the pocket-sized volume (Apparatus ad omnium gentium historiam, Venice, Ciotti, 1597 and, in Italian translation, Apparato all'historia di tutte le Nationi, 1598), in which he brought together book 16 [De Humana Historia] and chapter 19 of book 15 of the Bibliotheca selecta, reorganizing the original text in its presentation, enriching it with ‘condensed' versions of classical works and, of course, updating it to the Index of 1596 […] The numerous reprints of these small volumes, intended mainly for the uneducated, attest to the extent of their penetration” (L. Balsamo, La Bibliografia. Storia di una tradizione, Florence, 1992, p. 40).
Antonio Possevino was born at Mantua to a family of goldsmiths. After a humanist education he served as tutor to two Gonzaga princes, both future cardinals. He entered the Jesuits in 1559 and spent several years in France as preacher, writer and superior, mainly at Lyons and Avignon. From 1573 to 1577 he was secretary to the Jesuit general Everard Mercurian in Rome. Pope Gregory XIII sent Possevino as nuncio to Sweden, where John III was inclining toward Catholicism. After John III reconsidered, Possevino was sent to Moscow. He did help establish six papal seminaries in Poland-Lithuania, Moravia and Transylvania and provided plans to foster Catholicism in them. Having fall into disfavour of the Habsburg and Sixtus V, the Jesuit general Claudio Acquaviva exiled him to Padua in 1587. Possevino's last twenty-three years, spent mainly in Padua, Venice, Bologna and Ferrara, were largely devoted to writing. His most ambitious works were Biblioteca selecta (1593), a kind of catholic bibliography on nearly all fields of knowledge, and Apparatus sacer (1603), a compendium of the lives and views of more than eight thousand ancient and modern authors on ecclesiastical subjects.
Edit 16, CNCE24250; Th. Bestermann, A World Bibliography of Bibliographies, Totowa NJ, 1971, col. 1884; A. de Backer-Ch. Sommervogel, Bibliothèque de la Compagnie de Jésus, Liège, 1872, VI, coll. 1079-1080, no. 24f.