Opera di agricoltura: nela q[ua]l si co[n]tiene a che modi si debbe coltivar la terra....

Venice: Bernardino de' Viani, 1538. Good. Octavo (17 cm); [784] pages (signed A-BBB\8, plus index signed with maltese cross\8). One full-page woodcut illustration within patterned border. Floral border around title (at the top of which is a cat and mouse, similar to the image used by Sessa), and floriated initials at the beginning of each of the 12 books. Modern vellum binding, reusing an 18th-century morocco label; tail edge of text block titled in contemporary manuscript. Title with small oil stain transferring to following several leaves until disappearing at the fifth leaf, outer conjugate of first and last gatherings guarded, last leaf extended at fore-margin with Japanese mending tissue. Good, crisp copy.

A sixteenth-century Italian translation of "Ruralia commoda," one of very few treatises on agronomy to appear during the Middle Ages, and the first printed modern text on agriculture when it was published in 1471. The book's enormous influence over Italian agriculture is evident even today in the rural Tuscan landscape, The manual covers all aspects of maintaining a productive farming household, including hydrology, organization of land and dwelling, planting, growing, harvesting, wines and wine-making, olive trees and their fruit, the cultivation of fruit trees but also of cedar and woodland trees, care of livestock, control of insects and pests, and on and on. The text was reprinted some 57 times in all the major European languages, including Polish, before 1700!