{"product_id":"biffi-tolomei-saggio-dagricoltura-1804","title":"Saggio d'agricoltura pratica toscana","description":"\u003cp\u003e1804 First Edition\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eIn 4to. Pp. [1] f.e., XV, 263, [2] folded plates, [1] r.e.\u003cbr\u003e\nFirenze (Florence)\u003cbr\u003e\nGiuseppe Tofani e Comp.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eContemporary cardboard binding, with exposed sewing at the spine. Front joint partially cracked and restored with modern Japanese paper. Traces of an old label at the spine. Stain to the back cover. Toning generally light, but pronounced in quires v-aa. On the verso of the title page, the armorial bookplate of Ricasoli Firidolfi, an oval cartouche with a rampant lion beneath the motto \"Rien sans peine.\" Old marginal tear repair to the first folding plate, almost invisible. Contemporary manuscript figures in red and black ink on both folding plates. A sound copy. Very good.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eFirst edition of this Saggio, in which Biffi Tolomei subjects the Tuscan estate to an unusually systematic form of practical and economic analysis, even teaching landowners how to audit its administration from the writing desk (\"dal tavolino\"). In the process, the author dismisses open-vat fermentation outright as \"una barbaria grossolana\" (a crude barbarism), and builds an empirical case for covered brick vats instead: a closed vessel keeps the cap of pomace from drying out and turning acetous, an argument for limiting exposure to air more than half a century before Pasteur supplied the microbiological explanation for acetification.\u003cbr\u003e\nAt the rear, two folding tables designed as blank accounting prospectuses have, in this copy, actually been put to work. A contemporary hand entered figures in black and red ink for ten named Tuscan properties. The tables thus preserve working estate accounts from the agricultural years out of which Biffi Tolomei's system emerged.\u003cbr\u003e\nThe copy carries the engraved armorial bookplate of the Ricasoli Firidolfi, with the motto Rien sans peine beneath a rampant lion, giving it an especially appropriate Tuscan viticultural provenance. The Firidolfi branch was united with Bettino Ricasoli's Brolio line in 1852 through the marriage of his daughter Elisabetta to Alberto di Giovanni Ricasoli Firidolfi, linking the provenance to the family whose name would become inseparable from the nineteenth-century development of Chianti.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eThe work is arranged in three parts, following the author's analytical index. Parte Prima, Sistema Agrario Toscano generale (Part One, General Tuscan Agrarian System), surveys the Tuscan agrarian system: terre appoderate and non appoderate (lands organized into tenant farms and lands not so organized), the division of labor under mezzadria (sharecropping), correctable errori agrarj (agricultural errors), reclamation, and Tuscan weights and measures. Parte Seconda, Istruzioni per sindacare dal Tavolino l'Amministrazione, e Manutenzione di una Tenuta Toscana (Part Two, Instructions for Auditing from the Writing Desk the Administration and Maintenance of a Tuscan Estate), turns estate management into an accounting exercise, using two folding printed prospectuses, Tavola A and Tavola B (Tables A and B), to audit a property from the writing desk. Parte Terza, Applicazione delli stabiliti principj (Part Three, Application of the Established Principles), puts the system to work through valuation by ledger column (colonnello), vine and olive cultivation, and calculation of the total worth of the fondo colonico (tenant farm).\u003cbr\u003e\nThe wine sections are unusually substantial for a general agrarian manual. The author describes governo (the practice of adding specially prepared grapes or must to wine), adding deeply colored, late-harvested grapes to barreled wine to restart fermentation and increase body and color, while admitting that the practice shortens keeping and encourages spoilage by late summer, and noting that the added must was routinely omitted from recorded yields.\u003cbr\u003e\nThree Tuscan systems of vine cultivation are distinguished: the stony, south-facing vineyard proper; low rows along field margins; and vines trained high on living trees across the plain, the traditional system generally known as piantata or alberata (tree-trained vines). The inverse relationship between yield and quality is treated as established practical knowledge. Named wines include Eleatico, said to derive from Greek cuttings and to have been successfully exported to Moscow; Moscadello from Syracusan stock, lighter and more elegant than its Sicilian parent, as well as another made at the Ginori porcelain works at Doccia; and Vino Santo (holy wine), treated as a method rather than a grape variety. Biffi Tolomei recalls tasting a twenty-year-old Vino Santo which, he claims, surpassed the finest wines of Europe.\u003cbr\u003e\nElsewhere the book treats sovescio (green manuring) with lupins, including the fraud surrounding supposed purchases for that purpose and the necessity of inspecting the fields themselves.\u003cbr\u003e\nThe folding tables mention ten Tuscan poderi (farms): Poggioli, Querceto, Pozzino, Lago, San Donato, Montecchio, Correntaje, Piazza, Castagnolo, and Lutiano. Within the tables, manuscript red ink distinguishes harvest from sowing entries, and other measurements.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eWe could have stopped at the caustic definition of open-vat fermentation as \"a crude barbarism,\" backing covered vats on empirical observation more than sixty years before Pasteur supplied the microbiological explanation. But the charm of the folding tables, filled with handwritten figures, takes us beyond the author and places the book in the working world of an early nineteenth-century Tuscan estate. And then there is the Ricasoli Firidolfi bookplate, elevating this otherwise unassuming agricultural manual with a noble provenance, and a real wine pedigree.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"La Fenice Antiquaria","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":49385894740203,"sku":"178-1804--750.00-211.00-2026","price":1108000.0,"currency_code":"KRW","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0766\/2000\/5611\/files\/00178_IMG_0501.jpg?v=1788993559","url":"https:\/\/fenicebooks.com\/en-kr\/products\/biffi-tolomei-saggio-dagricoltura-1804","provider":"La Fenice Antiquaria","version":"1.0","type":"link"}