First Italian edition of the Continuation des mille et une nuits, an ambitious project to extend the Arabian Nights as translated by Antoine Galland. The Galland Manuscript, the Arabic source, ended at Night 282, and Galland had to supplement his work with original inventions or by translating French novels that were only orally transmitted.
In the 1780s, the Syrian monk Diyunisus Shawish, renamed Dom Denis Chavis, arrived in Paris. Short of money, he decided to take advantage of the literary vogue of the moment, and announced that he could prepare a more complete manuscript of the Thousand and one nights than Gallands. He proceeded to transcribe the existing corpus, introducing numerous changes and expanding it with other stories from a manuscript he had brought with him from Syria. The operation proved successful: the Genevan publisher Paul Barde, who was producing an impressive anthology of fairy tales entitled Cabinet des Fées, commissioned Chavis to translate much of the material into French, and then entrusted the text to the writer Jacques Cazotte, who carefully revised it and even added stories of his own invention. The result of this singular collaboration was this beautiful Continuation (first published at Geneva in 1788).
Wrappers worn and chipped, the edges are somewhat frayed. Otherwise in good condition. OPAC SBN IT\ICCU\LO1E\019383 (7 copies); WorldCat (4 copies, incl. 1 possibly only vol. 1); cf. not in Chauvin.