Third valuable folio edition of the famous Encyclopedia of the Enlightenment, printed in 1500 copies and much rarer than the French original published in Paris between 1751 and 1772. ''The vast echo aroused in the world by the publication of that grandiose monument of human science and the innovative philosophical spirit of his time, which was Diderot's Encyclopedia, printed in France from 1751 to 1772, and the eminent place held by Livorno at that time in the Italian publishing market... induced two citizens of Livorno, the Abbot Michelangiolo Serafini and Filippo Gonnella, to join the Florentine Pietro Gaetano Bicchierai, to take the initiative of printing in Livorno the third edition... of the immense work of the French Encyclopedists, which anticipated and prepared the spirits for one of the most vast upheavals European and perhaps global politicians: the revolution of '89. Abbot Serafini, highly cultured and scholar, founder of the first public library in Livorno... was already practicing, together with the merchant Gonnella, the typographical art in our city, publishing, in 1768, the Nouveau Dictionnaire des sciences, des arts et de metiers. (...) While, in fact, the last volumes of the Encyclopedia were still being printed in France, the publishers Serafini, Gonnella and Bicchierai addressed, towards the second half of 1769, a petition to the Grand Duke Pietro Leopoldo to obtain the faculty of publish a new edition in Livorno and, while they begged the Grand Duke himself to accept the dedication, they ''begged'' him to grant them free use of a warehouse located inside the old convicts' bathroom, where the hospital later arose civil, now demolished to build the current Government House. (...) The open and far-sighted mind of Pietro Leopoldo, known universally for the brilliant and daring political, social, religious and economic reforms applied, during his Grand Duchy, to Tuscany, from which he made every trace of the Middle Ages disappear, allowed him not only to approve the printing of the new edition of the Encyclopedia in Livorno but, by also accepting the dedication and subsequently allowing the Publishers to raise the "Royal Arms" on their own printing press, he placed, in a certain way, under the his protection the undertaking of a very daring work, opposed and feared by the coterie of European princes, a prelude to the affirmation of the "Rights of Man" which, thanks to the French Encyclopedists, were, at that moment, threateningly facing the limelight of the political and civil life of Europe and the world. As soon as the new characters arrived from England, in January 1770, the publishers immediately began printing the work, but they soon realized that the space, granted to them by munificence of the Grand Duke, was insufficient to carry out the complex work, so, on 15 June 1777, they turned to him again, humbly begging him that (at the Government's expense) an addition to the said Warehouse be built, with more to be built above the attached shops at the Main Wall of the Bath (of the Convicts), declaring themselves willing to pay the amount of rent that the Grand Duke liked to establish. The construction was ready within a few months: as soon as the publishers were in possession of it, they gave a new impetus to the work, and again by concession of Pietro Leopoldo they raised the "Royal Arms" at the entrance to the printing house. At the beginning of the year 1779, after nine years of uninterrupted and fruitful work, the last of the thirty-three large folio volumes of Diderot's immense work was used by the old and glorious presses (...).'' Guido Chiappini, published on magazine of the Municipality of Livorno ''Liburni Civitas'', a. XV, f. IV, 1942, pp.166-176.