Tag Archive: 0Italian

As readers of this blog and members of We Love Endpapers know, Simon is always on the lookout for new and unusual decorated papers. Recently, he came across a fantastic example of Italian block-printed endpapers on a little Armenian book…

As readers will know, we are based in Chesham, just a twenty-minute drive from Edmund Burke’s former home in Beaconsfield. Though his estate, Gregories, no longer exists…

Although perhaps largely forgotten now, Giambattista Casti (1724–1803), Salieri’s favoured librettist in Vienna in the 1780s, was notorious in his day, with a reputation for syphilis—Pushkin later wrote of the ‘noseless Casti’ in his lyric ‘K vel’mozhe’ (‘To a Grandee’, 1830)—and ‘for writing witty, salacious satires, as a sort of obscene, Italian Voltaire.  Casanova had […]