United States or Slovakia ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !


Its editor was the archpriest Ferrara of Mantua; but on the title-page appeared, as the name of its author, Fontanini, Archbishop of Ancira, a greatly respected prelate who had died nearly seventy years before, and there was also stamped, not only upon the preliminary, but upon the final page of the work, the approval of the Austrian government. To this was added a pious motto from St.

In Italy, before he had reached his twentieth year, he was well known to the learned world, and had engaged the esteem of many eminent men; among others, of Vincenzo Gravina, Niccolo Valletto, Fontanini, Quirino, Anton Maria Salvini, and Henry Newton, the English Ambassador to the Duke of Tuscany. Their letters to him are preserved in the Bodleian.

The director of the Venetian archives discovered and had the courage to announce that the work was a pious fraud of the vilest type; that it was never written by Fontanini, but that it was simply made up out of the old scurrilous work of Vaerini, suppressed over thirty years before.

Greene adds in a note to this passage: "He did so also with the translation of Marco Polo. See Apostolo Zeno, Annot. alla Bib. Ital. del Fontanini, tom. II, p. 300; ed. di Parma. 1804."