![]() ![]() After all, Vespasiano’s most important clients included the “Renaissance type that combined cultural refinement and religious piety with obscene ostentation and murderous savagery,” who nonetheless dreamed of life “free from the bustle of civilization,” with “plenty of leisure for writing books and, even more, for collecting them.”Ĭopyright ©2023 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. King holds up Vespasiano’s life as a prism through which to survey the vast and astounding events of 15th-century Italy. The bestselling author of Brunelleschi’s Dome and Michelangelo and the Pope’s Ceiling captures the excitement and spirit of the Renaissance in this chronicle of the life and work of the king of the world’s booksellers and the technological disruption that forever changed the ways knowledge spread. In “The Bookseller of Florence,” Ross King relates the fascinating story of a bookstore run by Vespasiano da Bisticci, a Florentine born in 1422, whose shop on the Via dei Librai, or Street of Booksellers, sat at the center of Florence’s golden age and its valiant recovery of ancient knowledge. Photo: Wikimedia CommonsĪt crucial times in history, bookstores may serve as meeting places, where visitors gossip, share ideas, perhaps dispute pressing issues of the day. ![]() View of Florence from Hartmann Schedel’s ‘Nuremberg Chronicle,’ 1493. ![]()
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