Quarter-bound in parchment and marbled boards. Paper label with a printed floral border on spine with a shelf mark. Folio, 2 ff, 1-33 pp., [34] p. blank. With an engraved title page, engraved half title of the second part (=pp. 21-22), two full-page engraved plates, and numerous engravings in text (including some large engravings printed on folding letterpress sheets with continuous pagination). Minor soiling. Otherwise, a very good, fresh, and clean copy.

The second edition of a very rare work on military architecture by Giusto Emilio Alberghetti (1666-1755), a member of the famous Alberghetti family, the chief suppliers of guns and cannons to the Venetian Arsenal from 1487 to 1793. The work provides a copiously illustrated survey of defensive and offensive architecture from 3900 BCE to the 1670s. This second edition, of which only two institutional copies are known in the world with none in the U.S., appeared only one year after the first was published.  

The work consists of two parts. The first book, devoted to defensive fortification systems, gives an overview of historical fortifications (including illustrations of several Assyrian fortifications with the earliest dated 3900 BCE) and contemporary defense systems with several engravings of Dutch fortifications, a horn work from a fortification of Emperor Ferdinand III, a fragment of the citadel in French Lille built in 1670 as well as a fragment of a design by Vauban. The book also contains numerous tables with information on fortification designs by Blaise François de Pagan and Vauban as well as a fortification of Charles II of England.

The second book, on offensive, illustrates various seventeenth-century types of sieges, trenches, and obstacles to troop movement. Two full-page engravings depict fragments of 15 types of fortifications in profile, including fortifications built in the siege of Nancy by Louis XIII in 1633 and fortifications built by Vladislaus IV and by his enemies the Muscovites near the town of Smolensk in 1634.

No copies of this edition in OCLC or KVK. Breman in his survey of Books on Military Architecture Printed in Venice records only two institutional copies of this edition in the world--at Istituto Storico e di Cultura dell'Arma del Genio (Roma) and at Bibliotheca Nazionale di Firenze. Only two copies of the first edition in the U.S.: at Fort Ticonderoga and at San Francisco State University Library.

The publisher of this volume, Girolamo Albrizzi (1662-1713) was the founder of the Albrizzi press, one of the most important publishing houses in the history of Venice. He launched, edited, and published La Galleria di Minerva, a miscellaneous Venetian publication that featured literary and scholarly texts as well as news, reports, essays, and reviews. Around 1696, he also founded the Academia della Minerva, Venice's own scientific society similar to others appearing in Europe at the time.

*Breman, Books on Military Architecture Printed in Venice: An Annotated Catalogue (2002): 004 (pp. 15-16); D'Ayala, Bibliografia militare italiana antica e moderna (1854), I, p. 82; "Alberghetti, Giusto Emilio, iunior," in Treccani; Claudio Griggio, "'La Galleria di Minerva' e Venezia: 'la più saggia, la più giusta, la più forte di tutte le Repubbliche'," Cahiers d’études romanes 12 (2005), pp. 13-24.

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