Ved. del Piano di Sorrento

Antonio Bulifon born in Chaponay. He came to Naples as a young man in 1670, and began his career in the print trade by working as a clerk in a bookstore. Three years later, when he married a Neapolitan woman, Maddelena Criscuolo, he had already opened his own shop on what was then the booksellers’ row of Naples, Via San Biagio dei Librai. He never owned his own presses, but instead rented those of other Neapolitan printers. For his printer’s device he chose a Siren, perhaps a symbol for his adopted city, and the motto “non sempre nuoce” (“she does not always harm”). Bulifon’s operation produced a wide variety of genres: history, lyric poet- ry, scientific and legal treatises, translations in both French and Italian, and collections of letters. While today he is often remembered for his series dedi- cated to sixteenth-century women poets, such as Vittoria Colonna (Stone 92), Bulifon specialized in publishing texts related to Naples and Neapolitan cul- ture. These included histories of the city and its noble families; a catalog of Neapolitan writers; guidebooks in Italian and French describing the archeo- logical, artistic, and natural treasures of the region; accounts of the eruptions of Mount Vesuvius; and a gazette dedicated to recording local events of note. His interest in Neapolitan culture also encompassed dialect literature. Indeed, one of the first works he printed was Basile’s Lo cunto de li cunti (1674). Edited by Pompeo Sarnelli, a cleric from Puglia who used the pseudonym Masillo Reppone when writing or editing dialect texts, Bulifon’s edition of Basile’s tales was the first to bear the alternative title Il Pentamerone. Bulifon continued writing, editing, and directing his press for thirty years. Sometime at the beginning of the eighteenth century, he turned the business over to his son Niccolò (De Caro 61). Niccolò Bulifon had been managing the family press for four years when in July 1707 the Austrians invaded Naples, driving out the Spanish-French factions to which his family belonged. By this time, his father, Antonio, had fled to Spain, where he sought the protection of Philip V, his former patron.6 Shortly after the Austrian invasion, an angry mob—perhaps incited by one of the Bulifons’ competitors—attacked and destroyed the bookshop. Antonio Bulifon died in 1707 in Spain.