Vocabolario, Grammatica et Ortographia della lingua volgare d’Alberto Acharisio da Cento con ispositioni di molti luoghi di Dante, del Petraca, et del Boccaccio

Venice: alla bottega d’Erasmo di Vicenzo Valgrisio, 1550. Hardcover. Very Good. 4to (205 x 145cm). [viii], 316pp., including errata leaf. Printer’s mark on title. Wood-engraved initials, some historiated. Italic type. Contemporary vellum; (slightest dampstaining at lower right corner before p.16; lacking ties, otherwise good, clean pages). Ex-Libris stamp of Umberto Banzi, Dottore, to front free endpaper and title. Accarisi’s seminal work on Italian grammar and vocabulary.

A native of Cento, Alberto Accarisi was a well-known Doctor of Law, philologist and one of the first scholars of Italian vocabulary and grammar. This is Accarisi’s second edition of the Vocabulario; his first was self-published in Cento in 1543. Accarisi was also known for an earlier work on grammar, Grammatica volgare (Bologna: 1536), which was reprinted several times, also in French at Louvain in 1555. The Vocabulario is on par with many of contemporary publications of a similar kind and in particular to the previous two lexical vocabularies - considered the first of the Italian language - that is, the Raccolta di voci del Decamerone of Lucilius Minerbi (1535) and the Vocabulario di cinquemila vocabuli Toschi..... del Furioso, Boccaccio, Petrarcha e Dante by Fabricio Luna (1536). Accarisi’s Vocabulario encompassed their grammatical, lexical and syntactic problems and it responded to the needs of its dissemination, which had been indirectly suggested by Pietro Bembo to his followers. Accarisi believed a given language is of utmost important and in his work he clearly distinguishes between poetic language and vocabulary prose without artificiality. The Vocabulario procured examples presented by Boccaccio, Petrarch and Dante.