Collector's picks

The exhibit on Angelo Sraffa does not merely reflect the robust legal and technical training of its subject, but also reveals his profound passion for humanities and keen awareness as a bibliophile. The caution in choosing volumes, attention to typographic particularities, and presence of decorated title pages and attached materials — such as clipped reviews and autograph annotations — all testify to a cultured and proactive attitude toward the book as an objective.

Particular volumes stand out in Italian literature, including Le rime di Petrarca con l’interpretazione di Leopardi, or Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman in the “Biblioteca dei popoli"series, led at the time by Giovanni Pascoli. Interest for the graphic features of decorated title pages also emerges in Angelo Fortunato Formiggini’s "Classici del ridere," as well as in Primo vere and Notturno by Gabriele D’Annunzio. Another example is a refined edition of Tristan and Isolde, printed in only 50 copies on Japanese paper and ornately decorated. In some cases, Sraffa supplemented the volumes with personal files, such as the review written by Giuseppe Antonio Borgese cut out and inserted in Via Laura by Marino Moretti, or the one signed “Il Bibliofilo” preserved within Goffredo Mameli’s Scritti.

Distinctly rich is the collection of French literature, in which numerous first editions can be found, including works by Honoré de Balzac (Les Cousin Pons, Contes Brunes, Les petits bourgeois, Les cent contes), Émile Zola (La Rêve, Pot-Bouille, L’Argent), Alexandre Dumas son (La question d’argent), Jules Romains (La vie unanime with an autograph dedication), and by Georges Duhamel, Maurice Leblanc, the Goncourt brothers, Hector Malot, and François-René de Chateaubriand — whose multi-volume work is enriched by the pencil annotation “original edition.” Frequent authors also include André Gide, Roger Martin du Gard, Romain Rolland, Paul Bourget and Alphonse Daudet.

Numerous volumes of French literary criticism, along with a surprising amount of Italian and foreign literature translated into French, complete this patrimony.