Giovanni Bazachi

Giovanni Bazachi, also recorded as Bazzachi, Bazacchi, Bazzacchio, and Bazzacco, was a printer, publisher, and bookseller established at Piacenza from the mid-1570s. The founder of a business subsequently continued by several generations of his family, he produced books for ecclesiastical institutions, jurists, literary readers, and purchasers of practical and popular literature. His birthplace and date of birth remain unknown. Archival evidence reported by Alfredo Cioni identifies his parents as Alessandro Bazachi and Chiarastella; in a petition submitted to the ducal authorities in 1604, Giovanni stated that he had settled in Piacenza in 1575. He must be distinguished from his grandson and namesake, Giovanni Bazachi the younger, who later obtained extensive printing privileges and died in 1698.

Bazachi entered the local trade through his marriage in 1576 to a sister of Anteo Conti, with whom he formed a printing partnership. The association connected him to an existing Piacentine enterprise and its established ecclesiastical clientele. Its production is securely documented by Giovanni Battista Antonucci’s Catechesis, seu Instructio, issued in 1576 from the workshop of Ioannes Bazzachius et Anteus Comes socii, at the instance of the bookseller Giovanni Paolo Cacciamali. This octavo, comprising [104], 414, [2] pages, was intended particularly for candidates for ordination, parish appointments, and authorization to hear confessions. The title page carries the arms of Bishop Paolo Burali. Its wording already describes revision and enlargement, placing the partners within the continuing publication history of a pastoral manual rather than identifying their edition as the work’s first appearance.

The transition to independent business requires a more qualified chronology than the conventional date of 1581 suggests. Cioni assigns to that year the establishment of Bazachi’s own printing office and bookselling concern, but the joint imprint remained in use in 1582, when Antonucci’s Catechesis appeared again under the names of Bazachi and Conti. Explicitly designated the fourth edition, this version advertised further organization and enlargement; Bazachi supplied its dedication to Carlo Borromeo. The surviving imprint therefore establishes continuing joint publication after the reported foundation of the separate business, without by itself resolving the partners’ precise contractual arrangements. The 1576 and 1582 editions also retain the Conti-associated device of Hercules overcoming the Lernaean hydra, with the motto At virtus superavit.

Bazachi’s retail premises stood beneath the porticoes of the communal palace, subsequently the governor’s palace, while his printing workshop occupied a house belonging to the Scotti di Agazzano in Via del Guasto. This separation accommodated the complementary activities of manufacturing books and selling both his own publications and other stock. Following Anteo Conti’s death in 1589, Bazachi acquired his former associate’s equipment, remaining stock, and typographical device. His independent enterprise thus consolidated the material resources of an earlier workshop. A mercantile assessment of 1610 valued the capital of his bookselling business, after deduction of debts, at 8,300 lire. That figure concerns the declared value of the business and should not be treated as a measure of annual turnover, print runs, or the number of presses employed.

An important example of his work for an external publisher is Stefano Guazzo’s Dialoghi piacevoli, printed at Piacenza in 1587 for Pietro Tini, identified on the title page as a bookseller in Milan. The edition followed the Venetian printing of 1586, produced by Giovanni Antonio Bertano. Bazachi’s responsibility for manufacture is specified in the colophon, while the formula ad instantia di Pietro Tini identifies the commissioning publisher. The substantial octavo contains [16], 586, [46] pages, ornamental initials and headpieces, and a Florentine-lily device. Its twelve dialogues address subjects including princely education, magistracies, emblems, the relationship between arms and letters, poetry, honour, self-knowledge, and death. This commission brought Bazachi into the regional circulation of an established literary work whose publication depended upon coordination between author, bookseller-publisher, and printer.

His capacity for substantial legal printing is demonstrated by the 1589 edition of Guglielmo Redoano’s Solemnis elegansque tractatus concerning the alienation of ecclesiastical property. This folio comprises [8], 588, [68] pages and incorporates annotations and additions by Pietro Antonio Pietra, together with further editorial correction by Alberto Dalla Porta. One issue names Salomone Bazachi as financier through the formula sumptibus Salomonis Bazachij; catalogues record another bearing the names of Giovanni Bazachi and Andrea Viani. These are described as different issues, a distinction that should be preserved rather than automatically counting them as separate editions. The book connects the workshop with specialist legal scholarship and with publishing arrangements involving capital beyond Giovanni’s own undertaking.

Ecclesiastical legislation supplied another substantial commission in the same year: Filippo Sega’s Synodus dioecesana, promulgating the constitutions of the Piacentine synod held on 3 May 1589. Bazachi printed the Latin quarto with [32], 372, [4] pages, Sega’s heraldic emblem on the title page, and his own device at the end. This volume continued the workshop’s service to diocesan government already visible in Antonucci’s manuals. Such books performed different functions within that market: the Catechesis prepared clergy for examination and pastoral duties, whereas the synodal constitutions supplied the authoritative legislation governing diocesan practice.

Bazachi also participated in the publication of illustrated practical books. A surviving example associated with Harvard’s Houghton Library is the 1592 Nova scielta de’ più belli lavori, et ricami, ch’oggidì s’usano, whose title advertises designs for large and small lace, cutwork, punto in aria, and rosettes. Cioni additionally records a 1594 pattern book under the title I più bei ricami che oggidì s’usano, describing it as predominantly woodcut. The relationship between these bibliographical references requires comparison of the actual editions before either is classified as a retitled reissue or a newly composed collection. The securely documented 1592 book nevertheless establishes the press’s involvement in a visual publishing tradition directed towards textile design and practical execution.

Religious historical writing could demand an equally extensive investment in composition and illustration. Giuseppe Falcone’s La cronica carmelitana, printed by Bazachi in 1595, traced Carmelite history from the prophet Elijah through the saints, generals, and distinguished members of the order. The illustrated quarto runs to almost eight hundred numbered pages; its recorded sequence is [12], 775 [i.e. 773], [3] pages, with two page numbers omitted. Carmelite emblems and devotional imagery distinguish the corporate identity of the subject from the printer’s Cerberus device, placed at the end. The publication demonstrates the workshop’s ability to undertake a lengthy historical compilation as well as shorter devotional and pastoral commissions.

A particularly revealing editorial intervention followed in 1597, when Bazachi issued Ortensio Lando’s Selva di bellissimi dubbi con dotte solutioni a ciascun dubbio accommodate, revised and annotated by the Piacentine Annibale Novelli. This was a reworking of material previously published in Lando’s Quattro libri de dubbi by Gabriel Giolito de’ Ferrari in 1552, rather than the first publication of Lando’s text. The new title organized the collection into two parts, devoted respectively to natural and moral questions; the earlier religious section was omitted. Novelli’s additions were marked with asterisks, making the intervention visible to readers. The octavo, [16], 279, [1] pages, therefore documents a local editor’s participation in reshaping an earlier Venetian publication for renewed circulation.

The press’s later output encompassed classical literature and further large theological undertakings. Its 1601 edition of Ovid’s Heroides combined the letters with the responses attributed to Aulus Sabinus, arguments and scholia by Guido Morillon, observations by Giovanni Battista Egnazio, and a commendation of poetry by Enrico Farnese. In 1616, the Bazachi imprint appeared on Luis de Miranda’s Manualis praelatorum regularium, edited by Paolino Berti, a folio publication arranged in three volumes and incorporating the De sacris monialibus. The identification of Berti’s editorial role is important: the imprint establishes the house’s participation in production and publication, while textual revision and the preparation of summaries belonged to the named scholar.

The workshop employed several visual identities. Its best-attested independent device represents Cerberus guarding the entrance to the underworld, accompanied by Fida custodia. It appears in legal, historical, and literary publications, including the Redoano, Falcone, and Lando editions. Another device, recorded by Cioni, depicts a woman stirring serpents with a wand beneath the motto Exciti exiliunt. Alongside these stood the inherited Conti imagery and the Florentine lily used in the Guazzo commission. This variety cautions against identifying a book’s producer solely from an emblem: the evidence must be read together with the imprint, colophon, and documented history of the blocks.

The closing chronology remains imperfectly reconciled. According to the archival account summarized by Cioni, a ducal provision of 14 August 1617 records Giovanni’s withdrawal and the transfer of the concern to his son Alessandro; the same account assigns his death to 1620 and burial to the church of the Madonna della Piazza, citing the San Protaso necrology. However, Giovanni Battista Spada’s Succisivarum horarum centones ex Virgilio is catalogued with the imprint apud heredes Io. Baz. already in 1614. The reported death date should therefore remain explicitly attributed until the original records and conflicting imprints are reconciled. Alessandro continued the establishment, and the younger Giovanni subsequently obtained the broad privilege of 1658, later confirmed under Ranuccio II Farnese. Those later monopolistic arrangements belong to the descendants’ business, whose institutional position had developed considerably beyond that of the founder’s workshop.