China.- Gonzalez de Mendoza (Juan) Dell'Historia della China, translated by Francesco Avanzo, title with woodcut printer's device, woodcut initials, 3 Chinese characters to pp.114-115, with blank ††8 and final leaf, some light water-staining, contemporary limp vellum, spine titled in manuscript, rather soiled and cockled, lacking ties, [Cordier BS 11; EDIT 16 CNCE 21464; Löwendahl 30; Sabin 27775], 8vo, Venice, Andrea Muschio, 1590.

⁂ An early Italian edition of this popular and influential history, first published in Spanish in 1585 at Rome, and in Italian translation the following year. By 1600 it had been published in seven European languages across many editions.
Juan González de Mendoza (1545-1618), an Augustinian friar commissioned by Pope Gregory XIII to write the work, never visited China but his book was the first major attempt to collect the information made available by the Portuguese and Jesuits and other material reaching Europe via Spanish missionaries and administrators in the Philippines. He relied heavily on the eyewitness accounts of the Portuguese Dominican Gaspar de Cruz, his fellow Augustinian Martín de Rada, who visited Fuijian in 1575, and Galeote Perreira, imprisoned in China from 1549 to 1552 for illegal trading, whose account was published by Cruz. Sabin claims this to be the first western book published to include Chinese characters.