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Della Valle's travels in Persia and the Near East, "one of the finest works of travel literature" (Howgego)

VALLE, Pietro della.
De volkome beschryving der voortreffelijke reizen van de deurluchtige reisiger Pietro della Valle, edelman van Romen, in veel voorname gewesten des werrelts, sedert het jaer 1615, tot in 't jaar 1626 gedaan ...
Amsterdam, Abraham Wolfgang, 1666 (each volume title: Abraham Wolfgang, widow of Jan Hendriks Boom, Jan Rieuwertsz., 1664-1665). 6 volumes bound as 1. 4to. With 25 engraved plates. 19th-century vellum.
€ 12,500
First Dutch edition, the first one to be illustrated, of Pietro della Valle's account of his travels in Turkey, Egypt, the Holy Land, Syria, Iraq, Persia (Iran) and India. Della Valle, an Italian nobleman, sailed from Venice in 1614 to Istanbul, where he arrived in August 1614. He spent a year exploring the city and continued to Rhodes, Alexandria, Rosetta, Cairo, crossing the Sinai desert to Jerusalem, Damascus and Aleppo. Rather than return to Istanbul, Della Valle decided at this point to travel to Persia to meet the Safavid ruler Shah Abbas I. He travelled with the next caravan to Baghdad, where he married Ma'ani-Jowayri, daughter of a Nestorian Catholic father and an Armenian mother, and together they continued through snow-covered Kurdistan to Isfahan (Persia), which they reached in March 1617. Della Valle sojourned in Persia until early 1623, witnessing and commenting on the escalating conflict between Shah Abbas and the Portuguese empire. He "displayed excellent narrative and descriptive skills, powers of acute observation, and a genuinely scholarly breadth of learning. He refused to comment on what he had not witnessed himself or checked against the best authorities ... Della Valle's eighteen letters from Persia provide one of the most detailed sources of information for most aspects of Persian life in the second half of Shah Abbas' reign" (Gurney).
With bookplate of J.K. Leeksma on pastedown. Some marginal water stains, several tears repaired and the general title-page somewhat dirty. Hinges reinforced, boards bowed, one corner of front board chipped. An impressive eye-witness narrative of travels in the Near East. Atabey 1270; Cat. NHSM I, p. 256; Howgego, to 1800, D30; STCN (5 copies, incl. 1 incomplete); Smitskamp, Philologia Orientalis II, 232; Tiele, Bibl. 1122; Tobler, p. 95; cf. Gurney, "Della Valle, Pietro", in: Encyclopaedia Iranica (online ed.).
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