VENUTI Antonino.

De agricultura opusculum.

      Venice, Melchior Sessa, 1536 8vo: Sessa's cat-and-mouse device on title-page, roman type. Recent binding of old vellum; ungenerous margins. Very rare second edition of an important work for our knowledge of agricultural practice in Sicily during the end of the 15th century and beginning of the 16th. The Latin title is left from the first edition, Naples, 1516; the text, however, is Italian. Venuti spent his life in Sicily and in this practical work exhibits the development during that period from its primitive economy based on sugar-cane towards the more modern practices of viticulture and the cultivation of fruit-trees, the two topics to which nearly all this manual is devoted. Nicoli, Scritti teorici e technici di agricultura, p.61 et seq.; Argoli p.47; not in BL.; not in Adams; NUC lists a single copy at Harvard; the Censimento notes only two copies - Casale Monferrato and Padova.