Libri di antiquaria nella corrispondenza tra Giovanni Bianchi e Alessandro Catani

Abstract

In the correspondence between Giovanni Bianchi and Alessandro Catani, the two correspondents combine the editorial reports of a scientific literature, suited to their medical profession, an antiquarian publishing line. Like all the members of the Republic of Letters in those years, even Bianchi, attracted by the fame of the excavations of Herculaneum and by the birth of the Academy of Antiquity requested by the young Charles of Bourbon, longed for the possession of the Neapolitan editions by the Palatine Printing House and by the local scholars. Between the pride for the volumes already present in his library and the insistent requests to his Neapolitan friends to receive the other missing ones for free in exchange for his writings, a twenty-year dialogue unfolds, in which the names of the most famous writers of the time emerge, including Berardo Galiani, Giacomo Martorelli, Giovanni Maria Della Torre, Nicola Ignarra, Gabriele Lancillotto, Prince of Torremuzza.

Keywords

• g. bianchi
• a. catani
• eighteenth century
• naples
• archeology