Viaggi di Enrico Wanton alle terre incognite australi, ed ai regni delle scimie, e de' cinocefali nuovamente tradotti da un manoscritto inglese

Four volumes, 8vo (157x100 mm). XXI, [1 blank], 472 + 619, [1 blank] + 648 + 646 pp. Lacking the final blanks in volumes one and four. With the author's engraved portrait as a frontispiece in volume one, 32 full-page engraved plates and 1 folding engraved map showing the Provincia de' Filosofi. Contemporary stiff vellum, ink title on spines, green silk bookmarks. Some occasional light foxing, a very good, fresh and genuine copy.

First edition, privately printed in Villa di Melma near Treviso, of the final draft of this utopian-philosophical novel modeled on Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels, the first part of which (in two volumes) had first appeared in Venice at Giovanni Tagier's presses in 1749 (cf. C. Pagetti, La fortuna di Swift in Italia, Bari, 1971, pp. 89-92).

Following a shipwreck, the protagonist, Enrico Wanton (who is in fact the author), and his friend, Roberto, find themselves in an unknown land, a decaying kingdom populated by monkeys, identified by some as Australia. This world more or less openly reflects the Venetian society of the time and is thus fiercely satirized. Wanton, i.e. Seriman, then expounds his philosophical view of culture and its social function. Following Maupertius's ideas, he states that literature must leverage the feelings and even the vices of men in order to effectively educate and reform them.

In the second part, written after 1758, the two travelers find themselves in the world of the Cynocephali, an ideal kingdom (identified by some as England) inhabited mostly by wise and isolated philosophers (cf. S. Kieremann, The Exotic and the Normative in Viaggi di Enrico Wanton alle Terre Australi Incognite by Zaccaria Seriman, in: “Eighteenth-Century Life”, 26, 3, 2002, pp. 58-77).

“Dampier's and Swift's use of the simian trope of as a way to capture Antipodal monstrousness was taken further in the utopian novel Viaggi di Enrico Wanton alle Terre Incognite Australi by Zaccaria Seriman, first published in 1749 and expanded in 1764. The first part of the novel takes the protagonist, a young Englishman named Enrico (Henry), to the Antipod regno delle scimie, the kingdom of the apes. As a classic antipodal inversion, the simian kingdom is a satire clearly aimed at Seriman's hometown of Venice, lampooning in true Enlightenment fashion the lagoon republic's baroque refinement of manners and customs. Antipodal monstrosity serves here again as a form of embodied satire that articulates by way of physiologial otherness a feeling of alienating sameness. In other words, Seriman's kingdom the apes is not monstruous because of its beastlike inhabitants, but because it raises the question of whether the Antipodeans ape their European counterparts, or vice versa. Monstrosity in Seriman's Antipodal utopia is, in the end, an excess of sameness” (D. Hempel, Australia as the Antipodal Utopia, London-New York, 2019, p. 119).

“[Seriman's] work is presented in the form of an imaginary voyage and contains many of the conventions of the genre. Two young men are shipwrecked on what is obviously the coast of Australia. They first spend some time in the land of the monkey people. Their study of that society provides a method through which Seriman is able to satirize eighteenth-century Venetian society. In the second part of the book the hero visits the land of the dog-headed people. There, an absolute monarch, despite his pessimistic view of human nature, has organized a group of philosopher statesmen as advisers through whom he attempts to create an orderly society […]” (A.O. Lewis, Utopian literature in the Pennsylvania state university libraries: a selected bibliography, University Park, 1984, pp. 175-176).

A Venetian writer and translator from a noble family of Armenian origin, Zaccaria Seriman spent most of his life working in the newspapers and publishing industry. In 1752, thanks to his family's considerable wealth, he took over Pietro Valvasense's printing house and opened a bookshop in the famous Mercerie district, where all Venetian book trade was centered at the time. The following year, together with G. Zanetti, A. Calogera, and G. Gozzi, he founded the literary review Memorie per servire all'istoria letteraria (‘Memoirs for Literary History'), in which he attempted to outline a sort of ideal library for the reform of society. As a publisher, his most important publication was the Storia generale dei viaggi (‘General History of Travels'), a translation of the renowned Histoire générale des voyages by A.F. Prévost, which he began in 1754.

Seriman unsuccessfully attempted to launch a wide-ranging cultural initiative modelled on a modern publishing house. Seeking to position himself between pure entertainment literature and high academic tradition, he used the newspaper, the printing press and the shop to promote a type of text that was both instructive and entertaining, to be disseminated to as many people as possible, within an autonomous and independent circuit. However, the project ultimately faded away, as did the family's money, because the time was not yet ripe. Following the departure of Goldoni and Baretti from Venice after 1762, Gozzi decided to close his last newspaper, marking the end of self-managed journalism (cf. G. Pizzamiglio, Zaccaria Seriman nella cultura veneziana del Settecento, in: “Gli Armeni a Venezia. Dagli Sceriman a Mechitar: il momento culminante di una consuetudine millenaria”, B. Levon Zekiyan & A. Ferrari, eds., Venice, 2004, pp. 125-139).

Italian Union Catalogue, IT\ICCU\TO0E\006168; E.A. Cicogna, Saggio di bibliografia veneziana, Venice, 1847, no. 2014; M. Parenti, Dizionario dei luoghi di stampa falsi, inventati o supposti, Florence, 1951, p. 37; G. Melzi, Dizionario di opere anonime e pseudonime, Milan, 1859, III, p. 216; M. Infelise, L'editoria del ‘700 e i Remondini, Bassano del Grappa, 1992, p. 91.

[14434]