De tesseris hospitalitatis. Liber singularis, in quo ius hospitii vniuersum, apud veteres potissimum, expenditur. Auctore Iacobo Philippo Tomasino episcopo Aemoniensi

4to (211x155 mm). [16], 151, [1] pp. Collation: a-b⁴ A-T⁴. Large woodcut printer’s device on the title page. Full-page engraving (“Tesserae antiquorum”) on p. 72 and 2 small woodcut illustrations on p. 149. Contemporary limp vellum with ink title along the spine. On the the title page manuscript note “Auctoris donum”. Worm track and worm holes to the bottom margin of several leaves at the center of the volume never affecting the text, otherwise a very good, genuine copy.

First edition of this treatise on hospitality in Roman antiquity and the legal and social practices associated with it, with particular reference to hotels, taverns, food, banquets, dining customs and the use of coins, called “tesserae hospitales”, which entitled the bearer to hospitality while travelling. The work was reprinted in Amsterdam in 1670.

Giacomo Filippo Tomasini, also encountered as Tommasini, was born at Padua on 17 November 1595 and died there on 13 June 1655. Ecclesiastic, antiquary, biographer, bibliographer, epigraphist and historian, he belonged to the learned culture that connected seventeenth-century Padua and Venice with the wider European Republic of Letters. His importance rests less on a single synthetic work than on the consistency with which he treated books, manuscripts, inscriptions, portraits, libraries, monuments and correspondence as documentary evidence. Tomasini repeatedly sought to preserve intellectual memory by fixing dispersed materials in print: cataloguing manuscript collections, reconstructing scholarly lives, recording inscriptions before their disappearance, describing collections and producing institutional histories from archival traces (cf. G. Trebbi, Tomasini, Giacomo Filippo, in: “Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani”, vol. 96. Rome, 2019, s.v.).