Pietro Della Valle

Pietro Della Valle

Pietro Della Valle(Latin:Petrus a Valle;2 April 1586 – 21 April 1652), also writtenPietro della Valle,was an Italian composer, musicologist, and author who travelled throughoutAsiaduring the Renaissance period. His travels took him to the Holy Land, the Middle East, Northern Africa, and as far as India.

Life

Pietro Della Valle was born inRomeon 2 April 1586, to a wealthy and noble family. His early life was spent in the pursuit of literature and arms. He was a cultivated man, who knew Latin, Greek, classical mythology, and the Bible. He also became a member of the RomanAccademia degli Umoristi,and acquired some reputation as a versifier and rhetorician. In 1611 he took part in a Spanish naval expedition against theBarbary States.

When Pietro was disappointed in love and began to consider suicide, Mario Schipano, a professor of medicine inNaples,suggested the idea of travelling in the East. It was Schipano who received a sort of diary in letters from Pietro's travels.

Before leaving Naples, Pietro took a vow to make a pilgrimage to theHoly Land.So, at age 28, he left Venice by boat on 8 June 1614 and reachedConstantinople;he remained there for more than a year and acquired a good knowledge of Turkish and a little Arabic. On 25 September 1615, he went toAlexandria.Because he was a nobleman of distinction, he travelled with a suite of nine persons, and with every advantage due to his rank. From Alexandria he went on toCairo,and, after an excursion toMount Sinai,left Cairo for the Holy Land. He arrived there on 8 March 1616, in time to take part in theEastercelebrations atJerusalem.

After visiting the holy sites, Pietro travelled fromDamascustoAleppo.After seeing a portrait of the beautifulAssyrian ChristianSitti Maani Gioerida, daughter of a Nestorian Catholic father and an Armenian mother,he went toBaghdadand married her a month later. While in the Middle East, he made one of the first modern records of the location of ancient Babylon and provided "remarkable descriptions" of the site. He also brought back to Europe inscribed bricks fromNinevehandUr,some of the first examples ofcuneiformavailable to modern Europeans.At that time Baghdad was being contested betweenTurkeyandIranduring the frequentOttoman-Persian Wars,so he had to leave Baghdad on 4 January 1617. Accompanied by his wife Maani, he proceeded toPersia,and visitedHamadanandIsfahan.In the summer of 1618, he joinedShah Abbasin a campaign in northernPersia.Here he was well received at court and treated as the Shah's guest.

When Shah ʿAbbās returned to winter quarters at Faraḥābād, Della Valle, who was unwell, went to Isfahan, where he hoped the Augustinians and Carmelites would restore him to health.On his return to Isfahan he began to think of going back home throughIndia,rather than endanger himself again in Turkey. However, the state of his health and the war between Persia and thePortugueseatOrmuzgenerated problems. In October 1621 he leftIsfahan,visitedPersepolisandShirazand made his way to the coast. While waiting for transport, his wife died shortly after delivering a stillborn child.It was not until January 1623 that he found a passage for Surat on theEnglishshipWhale,CaptainNicholas Woodcock.

He sojourned in India until November 1624, his headquarters beingSuratandGoa.In India, Pietro Della Valle was introduced to the King Vekatappa Nayaka ofKeladi,South Indiaby VithalShenoy,the chief administrator of those territories. The accounts of his travels are one of the most important sources of history for the region.

He was atMuscatin January 1625, and atBasrain March. In May he started by the desert route to Aleppo, and boarded on aFrenchship atAlexandretta.He reachedCyprusand finallyRomeon 28 March 1626. There, he was received with many honours, not only in literary circles, but also fromPope Urban VIII,who appointed him a gentleman of his bedchamber. The rest of his life was uneventful; he married his second wife, Mariuccia (Tinatin de Ziba), aGeorgianorphan of a noble family. She had been adopted by his first wife as a child, had travelled with him, and was the mother of fourteen children. He died in Rome on 21 April 1652,and is buried at his family's burial vault atSanta Maria in Ara Coeli.

By 1665 the portion of his "Travels" dealing with India and with his return had been translated into English. They contain accounts of his discussions with "Hindoo" Brahmans about whether the Egyptians or Indians first came up with the concept of reincarnation, a dialogue with a woman who invited him to her upcomingsati,a description of the barefoot 'Queen of Olaza', who was out on the embankments giving directions to her engineers—and many other bits of first-rate ethnography.

Apart from his activities as an ethnographer, Della Valle was also a composer and a writer of theoretical treatises on music. He composed several dialogues (actually brief oratorios) on biblical subjects. His only preserved work is an oratorio composed for l'Oratorio del Croficisso di San Marcello, where he experiments with musical modes and scales inspired by ancient music theory. For this purpose, he developed two new instruments, such as a "violone panharmonico" and a "cembalo triharmonico". Notwithstanding his interest in ancient musical practices, in his theoretical writings on music (e.g. "Della musica dell'età nostra che non è punto inferiore, anzi è migliore di quella dell'età passata", Rome 1640, and "Note… sopra la musica antica e moderna, indirizzato al Sig.r Nicolò Farfaro", 1640/41), he praises the modern music culture in contemporary Rome and defended the modern music against the criticism of Nicolò Farfaro, anItalianmusician of his times.

Pietro Della Valle also wrote texts andlibrettosfor several musical spectacles, such as "Il carro di fedeltà d'Amore", (music by his teacher of harpsichordPaolo Quagliati,performed in Rome in 1606 and printed in 1611), and "La valle rinverdita" (written in celebration of the birth of his first child in 1629, now lost).

Works

• Il Carro di Fideltà d’amore(music by Paolo Quagliati), Robletti, Roma, 1611.
• "Funeral Oration on his Wife Maani", whose remains he brought with him to Rome and buried there (1627)
• Account of Shah Abbas(1628)
• Discorso sulla musica dell'età nostra,Roma, 1640.
• TheTravels in Persia(2 parts) were published by his sons in 1658, and the third part (India) in 1663.
• Viaggi di Pietro Della Valle il pellegrino, con minuto ragguaglio di tutte le cose notabili osservate in essi: descritti da lui medesimo in 54 lettere familiari all'erudito suo amico Mario Schipano, divisi in tre parti cioè: la Turchia, la Persia e l'India. Colla vita e ritratto dell'autore.Roma 1650–1658, Torino 1843.
• Diario di viaggio in Persia (1617-1623),a cura di Mario Vitalone. ISMEO, Roma 2023.ISBN978-88-66872-55-9

Book collector

Pietro Della Valle was also a famous book collector. "In a letter written in Damascus and Aleppo, dated June 15, 1616, Della Valle described his delight at finding some rare Samaritan manuscripts, some of them with glosses in Arabic, for sale."

See also

• García de Silva Figueroa

References

Bibliography

• This article incorporates text from a publication now in thepublic domain:Chisholm, Hugh,ed. (1911). "Valle, Pietro della".Encyclopædia Britannica.Vol. 27 (11th ed.). Cambridge University Press.
• This article incorporates text from a publication now in thepublic domain:Herbermann, Charles, ed. (1913). "Pietro della Valle".Catholic Encyclopedia.New York: Robert Appleton Company.
• http:// columbia.edu/itc/mealac/pritchett/00generallinks/dellavalle/index.html
• R. Amalgia, 'Per una conoscenza piii completa della figura e dell'opera di Pietro della Valle', Rendiconti dell'Accademia dei Lincei, series vin, vol. vi, 1951, 375–81.
• L. Bianconi,Viaggio in Levante di Pietro della Valle,Florence, 1942
• P. G. Bietenholz,Pietro della Valle 1586-1652: Studien zur Oeschichte der Orientkenntnis und des Orientbildes im Abendlande, Basel-Stuttgart,1962
• Wilfrid Blunt,Pietro's Pilgrimage: a Journey to India and Back at the Beginning of the Seventeenth Century,London, 1953.
• I. Ciampi,Della vita e delle opera di Pietro della Valle, il Pellegrino,Rome, 1880
• E. Rossi, 'Pietro della Valle orientalista romano (1586–1652)', Oriente Moderno, XXXIII, 1953, 49-64
• ________, 'Versi turchi e altri scritti inediti di Pietro della Valle', Rivista degli Studi Orientali, xxn, 1947, 92-8
• A complete edition of della Valle's letters to Mario Schipano is by G. Gancia, Viaggi di Pietro della Valle, il Pellegrino, Brighton, 1843
• Other letters from Persia have been edited by F. Gaeta and L. Lockhart, viaggi di Pietro della Valle: Lettere dalla Persia, vol. I, Rome, 1972.
• John Gurney has two informative articles on della Valle: One is J. D. Gurney. "Pietro della Valle: The Limits of Perception" in Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies, Vol. 49 (1986), no. 1, pp. 103–116; the other one is his entry in theEncyclopædia IranicaArchived15 December 2007 at theWayback Machine
• Robert R. Holzer. "Della Valle, Pietro." Grove Music Online.oxfordmusiconline,October 2010.Oxford Music Online
• Avner Ben-Zaken,"FROM NAPLES TO GOA AND BACK: A SECRETIVE GALILEAN MESSENGER AND A RADICAL HERMENEUTIST",History of Science,xlvii (2009), pp. 147–174.
• Avner Ben-Zaken, "Exchanging Heliocentrism for Ur-Text", inCross-Cultural Scientific Exchanges in the Eastern Mediterranean 1560-1660(Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010), pp. 47–75.

External links

• Works by or about Pietro Della ValleatInternet Archive
• bartleby,The Columbia Encyclopedia, Sixth Edition. 2001