Bifolium from a large humanist manuscript of Fazio degli Uberti, Dittamondo, in Italian, on parchment [Italy, mid-fifteenth century]

Two conjoined leaves, each with single column of 33 lines of an accomplished humanist hand (with parts of chapters X-XI and XIII-XIV), one large simple initial in pale blue, the text set within an extensive gloss in Italian in smaller script, recovered from the binding of a seventeenth-century book and hence with scuffs, spots, small holes, one corner torn away with loss to gloss there, scrawls and areas of text on outerside abraded and illegible, each leaf approximately 330 by 240mm.

Fazio degli Uberti (1305/09-67) was a Florentine in the service of the Visconti, with this, the Dittamondo, his magnum opus. It was composed in emulation of Dante's La divina commedia, as a lengthy didactic poem in which the narrator tells that after a meeting with the allegorical figure of Virtue, he and the Roman geographer Solinus travelled the whole world (here Italy, Greece, Germany, France, Spain, northern Europe, Africa and parts of Asia), with Solinus giving the narrator descriptions of the cities visited. In addition, numerous other snippets of information are added from the works of Pliny the Elder, Isidore of Seville and Pomponius Mela. It remained incomplete on the author's death.

While no comprehensive survey of manuscripts exists, it is clear that the text is rare in manuscript, with the Arlima website listing only BnF., italien 81 and Venice, Biblioteca Nazionale, Marciana, Cl. IX, c. XI. To these should be added Turin, Biblioteca Nazionale Universitaria, cod N 1 5; Milan, Biblioteca Nazionale, AC.X.30; and other single volumes in the Biblioteca Riccardiana in Florence, the Biblioteca Angelica in Rome and the university library of Bologna, as well as a fourteenth-century fragment in the Biblioteca Archiginnasio in the same city. The Schoenberg database lists no copy offered for sale since that from the Joseph Martini library, by Hoepli on 27 August 1934 (lot 177 there), with that previously appearing as Sotheby's, 10 June 1918, lot 504.