Nova et Accurata Tusciae Antiquae Descriptio

The Seminary Printing House was established in 1684 at the behest of Cardinal Gregorio Barbarigo, Bishop of Padua, and during the eighteenth century it was one of the most important publishing entities in the entire state of the Republic of Venice. Barbarigo's decision was a direct consequence of the reform of studies carried out within the seminary starting in 1678, aimed at preparing the future priests of the Paduan diocese in Semitic languages-especially Arabic and Hebrew-as well as in Greek, so that they could also be ready as missionaries to be sent to the Near East and Balkan Europe. However, there were no texts suitable for the study of such languages on the Venetian book market, so as early as 1681 the cardinal was forced to have an elementary grammar of Hebrew printed in Venice. Dissatisfied with the result, Barbarigo resolved to establish his own printing house and, thanks to the gift of matrices and punches of printing characters in Greek, Hebrew Arabic and other Semitic languages from the Grand Duke of Tuscany Cosimo III, Duke Borromeo president of the Biblioteca Ambrosiana in Milan and Cardinal Girolamo Casanate of the Tipografia della Propaganda Fide in Rome, he was able to start the business in a short time. During the period when Barbarigo held de facto directorship of the printing house in person, that is, until his death in 1697, production was based mainly on texts for the internal school of the Seminary, on works for third parties and, starting in 1690, on the so-called "red and blacks," or liturgical books, which were printed using ink of the two colors and whose sale proved to be very profitable. Beginning in the year 1700, the new bishop Giorgio Corner entered into a contract with a young Venetian bookseller matriculated to the art, Giovanni Manfrè, who became the sole agent of the Paduan printing house operating in the lagoon square. Thanks to Manfrè's skill and the print shop's production capacity, within a few years the firm became one of the most important in the entire Italian peninsula, spreading its prints as far as the Iberian peninsula. Giovanni Manfrè was succeeded in 1743 by his son Marcantonio, who continued his father's successful policy without appreciable change, but in 1785 business relations between the two parties came to an end. The Seminary of Padua then formed a 50-50 partnership with the Venetian firm formed by Giulio Foresti and Nicolò Bettinelli, a company that was dissolved in 1809. It was during this period - precisely between 1783 and 1817 - that the most important and challenging edition in the entire history of the Seminary Printing House saw the light of day, namely the Encyclopédie méthodique, which together with Forcellini's Lexicon, which was reissued and updated several times, gave clear fame to the Paduan presses. After the attempt made by Giuseppe Furlanetto to publish a series called "Collezione de' Classici latini," which, however, between 1813 and 1819 saw the release of only 17 volumes, the activity of the Seminary Printing House no longer went beyond the sphere of the diocesan territory, as commercial contacts with large-scale book and publishing distribution had been severed. Despite these limitations, the presses continued uninterruptedly in their work until 1938.