THE FIRST BOOK PRINTED IN ITALY.
They left Germany still young, in the sixties of the fifteenth century, with a precise destination, perhaps already Rome. Presumably summoned by Cardinal Nicolò Cusano, the German printers Konrad Sweynheim and Arnold Pannartz, who were respectively clerics of the dioceses of Mainz and Cologne, between 1464 and 1465 came down from Germany to go to Rome and set up a printing house there. The unexpected death of Cusano in the summer of 1464, and perhaps other reasons that escape us today, convinced the two German clerics to stop in Subiaco, in one of the most important Benedictine monasteries. In Santa Scolastica they found a rich library and monks, mostly German, willing to collaborate in the enterprise of starting that "divina ars...artificialiter scribendi" in Italy, in the cradle of Christianity and humanism. Here they worked for a few years, choosing to adapt their graphic sensibility to the Italian one: which meant redesigning the Gothic character, adapting it to the roundness of the Roman. The real innovation of printing is all in the design/creation of an alphabet with movable characters that could mold itself to the infinite combinations created by the letters, to give life to infinite pages/books. After a first experiment of a few papers intended for the study of young people, that Donatus vanished into thin air, they sent three works by Lactantius to print in October 1465. The text was not chosen at random, because those works they responded perfectly to the cultural and religious climate of those years, between Ciceronianism, Christian providentialism, fusion between classical and Christian culture. They made 275 copies, over 40 still survive. Some, like the present one, were enriched in Rome with a standardized illustrative kit which included the canonical white girari decoration of the capitals, a decoration created in one of the many miniaturists' workshops very active in the capital. But Subiaco necessarily had to give way to Rome, where their new patron Giovanni Andrea Bussi was eagerly waiting to illustrate to the world - who had always met there - the new admirable invention. They brought with them all the copies due to them of the incunabula printed in Subiaco and moved to Rome at the end of 1467. And already in November the bishop of Massa Leonardo Dati declared that he had bought a copy of the De civitate Dei < in Rome /i>of St. Augustine, "by those same Teutonics who live there, who do not use to write books but print them with forms". Subiaco's Lactantius is undoubtedly the most famous book in the history of Italian typography. The first dated book ever printed in Italy and one of only four editions printed by Gutenberg's pupils in their first printing house, that of Subiaco, which is also the first location outside Germany to have a typography equipped with tools entirely made on site. The importance of this edition also lies in the fact that it is «the second Italian printing with Greek characters. The use of Greek characters had become necessary since Lactantius in De divinis institutionibus had reported some quotations in the original language, such as those of the Asclepius or Lógos téleios; however, the Greek types must have been supplied, or manufactured, only during the composition, since the first leaves still show the corresponding spaces blank, while later the Greek text regularly alternates with the Latin one» (S. Gentile - C. Gilly, Marsilio Ficino and the return of Hermes Trismegistus, Florence 2001, pp. 160-61). Goff L1; HC 9806*; Pro 3288; BMC IV 2; IGI 5619. 
This copy is sold with a Certificate of Free Circulation.