Jean-Jacques Barthèlemy 1791 Zatta Viaggio d’Anacarsi

Viaggio d'Anacarsi il Giovine nella Grecia: complete 12-volume set with all 31 folding plates. Venice, Antonio Zatta e Figli, 1791–92. A complete 18th-century Venetian set of one of the most popular books of its era: the Italian translation of the Abbé Barthélemy's Voyage du jeune Anacharsis en Grèce (Paris, 1788). All 12 volumes are present. Tomi I–IX and XI–XII are dated 1791 and Tomo X is dated 1792, all printed in Venice by Antonio Zatta e Figli, one of the leading Venetian publishers and map-makers of the period. The plates: complete, 31 of 31. The set has every one of its 31 folding engraved plates, checked against the plate index printed in Tomo XII. That includes the plates most often missing from surviving sets: the map of the Black Sea and Sea of Azov (Palus Maeotis and Pontus Euxinus), and the view of Plato teaching his students at Cape Sunium. These plates are routinely cut out and sold separately, so complete sets are hard to find. The plates include: A large general map of Greece and its islands. Regional maps of Attica, Boeotia, Thessaly, Phocis, the Peloponnese regions (Arcadia, Laconia, Messenia, Elis, Argolis and Corinthia), the Hellespont, the Bosphorus and the Cyclades. Plans of the battles of Thermopylae, Salamis and Plataea. Plans of Athens and its surroundings, the Academy, and the topography of Olympia, Sparta and Delphi. Architectural plates of the Parthenon, the Propylaea, a Greek house, a palaestra and an ancient theatre. The view of Plato at Cape Sunium. A plate of ancient Greek coins from the French royal collection. The maps' author. The maps and plans were drawn by Jean-Denis Barbié du Bocage, the foremost French geographer of the ancient world in his day and a pupil of the great cartographer d'Anville. His name is engraved on the plates. His Critical Analysis of the Maps of Ancient Greece, explaining the sources behind every map, makes up the first part of Tomo XII. The author. Jean-Jacques Barthélemy (1716–1795), known as the Abbé Barthélemy, was a French scholar and numismatist. For decades he was keeper of the King's cabinet of coins and medals in Paris, and he was elected to the Académie française. He spent about thirty years writing Anacharsis. On publication in 1788 it was an immediate European bestseller, translated into most major languages and reprinted for decades. What it's about. The book is a journey through ancient Greece told as a travel diary. A young Scythian named Anacharsis, descendant of the philosopher of the same name, arrives in Greece in the 4th century BC, in the years before Alexander the Great. He travels through Athens, Sparta, Corinth, Delphi, Olympia, Thebes and the islands. Along the way he describes their history, governments, religion, festivals, theatre, the Olympic Games, philosophy, art and daily life, and he meets figures such as Plato. The narrator is fictional, but everything he describes is drawn from classical sources and documented in extensive notes, which made the book the standard popular introduction to ancient Greece for generations of readers. Tomo XII also contains chronological tables of Greek history, a list of notable writers and artists, conversion tables for ancient measures, distances, coins and weights, an index of the classical authors cited, and a general index to the whole work. Binding: contemporary half leather, with leather spines and marbled paper boards. Condition: There is some wear to the spines and some minor foxing on some of the pages yet this is almost 250 year old book, the maps are in immaculate condition. The books are in good condition, some small elements of age, the occasional page is fox eared or there is a small 2-3mm piece missing but that is very rare and not at all the norm. Compared to other books of this era it is in great condition Language: Italian, translated from the French.