This coming year of 2017 marks the 250th anniversary of the start of one of the most ambitious publishing projects ever undertaken in eighteenth-century Italy, the Ornithologia methodice digesta of Salverio Manetti.
As in many contemporary works, the text of the lavishly illustrated volumes is bilingual, the inner of the two columns on each page in Italian, the outer in Latin, such that on each opening the vernacular is flanked by the eternal language of western scholarship.
The two texts are very nearly the same — but not quite identical. Manetti appears to have been aware that his two audiences, the vernacular and the erudite, brought different expectations to the text, an awareness made almost explicit in one of the few variant readings introduced by the translator.
In his introductory note, the author alerts Latin readers to his having provided in each volume but the last
a text that will teach the reader more and more about this field of knowledge.
The translation adds something: all of the volumes but the index contain
an instructive and entertaining text,
“un instruttivo e dilettevol discorso.”
Manetti and his publishers were covering their commercial bases.
