[UTOPIAN LITERATURE]. Republica di Lesbo overo Della Ragione di Stato in un Dominio Aristocratico Sgualdi, Vincenzo Boston Book Fair 2025,History and Biography,Literature and Literary Studies

12mo. Frontispiece by Gianbattista Cavazza, [24] ff. (title, dedication, preface, list of authors), 380 pp., [16] ff. (index), COMPLETE (some soiling and staining, signs of age). Bound in 18th (?) century carta rustica, covered (in the 19th century?) in thin blue cloth (soiled and lightly worn), old paper label on spine lettered in MS (partially defective). Verso of half-title backed with paper on which have been written considerable bibliographic notes, apparently covering earlier notes (becoming detached); inside front cover fully annotated with bibliographic notes in a 19th-century hand, additional MS notes on c2v. A good+ copy. A RARE AND VERY LITTLE-KNOWN WORK OF UTOPIAN LITERATURE, an allegory on Venetian Republican "Reason of State." The author, Vincenzo Sgualdi (d. 1650) disguises his criticism of the Venetian Republic in a portrayal of the fictional island of Atlantis, here identified as the Greek island of Lesbos. The work is notable for its presentation of economics and its symbiotic relationship with politics, in which the genre of Utopian Literature is employed as a vehicle for political and social criticism. J.-F. Lattarico explains: "In the 17th century, the political myth of Venice, although in decline, was still embodied in numerous fictional texts, epics, and utopian treatises that notably updated the myth of Atlantis. Abbot Vincenzo Sgualdi, an incognito academic, published several political texts in which he defended the aristocratic ideal, inherited among other things from the Platonic model. [.] The Republica di Lesbo is a utopian journey to this reinvented Greek island, governed by a perfect government behind which the model of the 'Serenissima' [of the Republic of Venice] lies transparently hidden." Additionally, points out that this important but little-studied text is one of the many avatars of the "Citta felice" of Venice, and continues the tradition of Utopian Literature initiated during the Renaissance. According to Peter Miller, "Sgualdi's 'Repubblica di Lesbo (1640) was a very thinly veiled allegory of contemporary Venetian government. The book was inspired by the problem that was only sharpened by the increasingly commercial societies of seventeenth-century Europe: the reconciling and uniting of 'two potent and extreme enemies, immense wealth and immense poverty.' Sgualdi made no pretense of vaunting the outstanding liberty that fueled earlier celebrations of the exemplarity of Venice. Sgualdi focused on the way in which the exchange of benefits made a society out of its haphazardly assembled individual ingredients. The common interest that beneficence could create among imperfect human beings was to be distinguished from the 'ideal' friendship whose essence required a rational self-control that was 'rarely or never' to be found in mixed, political society. Sgualdi wrote that, while many in republics had boasted on the perfection of friendship, none had yet attained that described by Seneca in his letters to Lucilius. The reassessment of friendship was central to Sgualdi's attack on the ideal of an equal republic. Because almost everyone was 'contaminated' by self-interest, the friendship based on utility that Cicero called 'amicitia suffragatoria' was a much more likely foundation for a society of inevitably interested and imperfect individuals. Sgualdi surveyed some of the different catagories of political friendship found in ancient Rome to show how inappropriate was the modern fascination with the Aristotelian model [.] Sgualdi followed with a series of classical examples to show that in politics friendship ought to be based on interest rather than on truth or equality. Sgualdi's cold reassessment of the social role of interest led him to dismiss the distinction drawn between public and private interest. Those who wept for a public calamity, he wrote, echoing Lipsius in De Constantia, actually wept for its impact on them. 'Private interest, he declared, 'is the real and inescapable storm for