Versi di Diodata Saluzzo Roero. Quarta Edizione Corretta e Accresciuta

Torino: Vedova Pomba e Figli, 1817. 4 volumes.  12mo.,  150 x 110 mm., [6 x 4 inches].  240 pp.; 256 pp.; 278 [1] pp.  xvi, 255 [1] pp.  Illustrated with an engraved portrait by P. F after a drawing by Dedemonici in volume 4.  Printed on thick paper and bound in late 19th century full red straight grain morocco, gilt decorative floral boarder on both boards, spine decorated in gilt, all edges gilt.  Some minor foxing to a few pages of text.  Book label of Marchesa Maria Louise Arconati Visconti in all four volumes. 
Collector’s copy of the poems, prose, and theater productions written by one of the first (truncated) women elected to the Accademia degli Arcadi in Rome under the name Glaucilla Eurotea.
Diodata Saluzzo Roero (1774-1840) was born in Turin, daughter of Giuseppe Angelo Saluzzo di Monesiglio, the noted chemist specializing in the study of gases and one of the earliest Italians to lecturer on the nature and characteristics of carbon dioxide.  He was correspondent of Benjamin Franklin.  She was educated as member of a noble family and studied literature, music and drawing and learned at an early age that poetry and drama were her favorite subject.  She began writing verse as early as age seven, but under the direction of her father she abandoned her passion to study science and chemistry.  At the age of 18 she wrote and published her first poem, dedicated to her cousin Erichetta, who had died prematurely and was one of her favorite companions.  In 1796 her first book of verse was published and reprinted in numerous editions over the next decades.  In 1801 she was married to Count Roero of Revello, who encouraged to write plays and poetry and over the next decade her publications were celebrated, and she received invitations to join numerous academies across the north of Italy.  Today Diodata is viewed as a pioneer female writer who as a member of the Arcadia represented the collected voice of feminists writers of periods past.
“It is to this Arcadian moment of feminist literary rediscovery that we can trace the strong sense of literary women as a “corporation down the ages” (to use a phrase of Croce’s) that we find a later Italian female writer like Diodata Saluzzo Roero, whose verses hymn a feminine literary succession stretching back through Faustina Maratti and Moderata Fone to “Veronica” and “Vittorio” to the far distant Sappho” (Cox).
This edition was printed by the widow of Giuseppi Pompa, noted printer of fine books in Turin during the first years of the 19th century.  This copy belonged to the Marchesa Maria Louise Arconati Visconti.  She was the wife of Marquis Arconati Visconti, who died after only three years of marriage in 1876.  He was a collector of art and with her inheritance she continued to collect, building a great gallery of paintings and a large library.  At the time of her death, she was called in tribute a “benefactress of arts and letters.”
Pietro Leopoldo Ferri, Biblioteca Femminile Italiana,  p.320-324 (“Questa bella Edizione”).   Virginia Cox.  Women Writing in Italy, p. 231. Letizia Panizza and Sharon Wood, A History of Women’s Writing in Italy, pp. 144-45.  . (Inventory #: 1268)