Pietro della Valle (April 2, 1586– April 21, 1652) was an Italian traveler in
Asia.
Biography
Pietro della Valle was born in Rome from a noble and very rich family.
His early life was divided between the pursuits of literature and arms. He was a cultivated man, who knew Latin, Greek the
Greek mythology and the Bible. He also became a member of the Roman academy of the Umoristi, and
acquired some reputation as a versifier and rhetorician. The idea of travelling in the East was suggested by a disappointment in
love, as an alternative to suicide, and was suggested by Mario Schipano, professor of medicine in
Naples. It was this last who received the letters, a sort of diary, from Pietro's travels.
Before leaving Naples he took a vow of pilgrimage to the Holy Land. He left Venice by boat
from on the 8th of June 1614 and reached Constantinople, where he remained for more than
a year and acquired a good knowledge of Turkish and a little Arabic. On the 25th of September 1615 he went to Alexandria with a suite of nine persons, because he travelled always as a nobleman of distinction, and with
every advantage due to his rank. From Alexandria he went on to Cairo, and, after an excursion to
Mount Sinai, left Cairo for the Holy Land where he arrived on the 8th of March 1616, in time
to take part to the Easter celebrations at Jerusalem.
After visiting the holy sites, he travelled from Damascus to Aleppo, and went to Baghdad after seeing a portrait of a beautiful woman, a
Syrian Christian princess named Maani, a native of
Mardin, who unfortunately died in 1621. He then decided to have her stuffed and take her along
all his journeys. After he visited Persia (The first documented ancestors of the Persian cats were imported from Persia into Italy in 1620 by Pietro della Valle); which was at that time in
war with Turkey, so he had to leave Baghdad on the 4th of January 1617. Accompanied by his wife
he proceeded by Hamadan to Isfahan, and joined Shah Abbas in a campaign in northern Persia, in the summer of 1618. Here he
was well received at court and treated as the shah's guest.
On his return to Isfahan he began to think of going back home through India rather than
adventure himself again in Turkey, but the state of his health and the war between Persia and the Portuguese at Ormuz generated problems. In October 1621 he left Isfahan, visited Persepolis and Shiraz
and made his way to the coast. But it was not until January 1623 that he found a passage for Surat on the English ship Whale.
He sejourned in India until November 1624, his headquarters being Surat and Goa.In India Pietro Della Valle was introduced to the King Vekatappa Nayaka of Keladi, South India by Vithal Shenoy, the
chief administrator of those territories.The accounts of his travels are one of the most important sources of history of the
region.
He was at Muscat in January 1625, and at Basra in March.
In May he started by the desert route to Aleppo, and boarded on a French ship at Alexandretta. He reached Cyprus and finally Rome on the 28th of March 1626 where he was received with many honors, not only from the literary circles but also
from the Pope Urban VIII, who appointed him a gentleman of his bedchamber. The rest of
his life was uneventful; he married as his second wife a Georgian orphan of a noble family, Mariuccia (Tinatin de Ziba), who had
been adopted by his first wife as a child, travelled with him and was the mother of fourteen children. He died in Rome on the
21st of April 1652.
Works
- "Funeral Oration on his Wife Maani", whose remains he brought with him to Rome and buried there (1627)
- Account of Shah Abbas (1628)
- The Travels in Persia (2 parts) were published by his sons in 1658, and the third part (India) in 1663.
Source
This article incorporates text from the Encyclopædia
Britannica Eleventh Edition, a publication now in the public
domain.
See these works for further information:
- R. Amalgia, 'Per una conoscenza piii completa della figura e dell'opera di Pietro della Valle', Rendiconti delVAccademia dei
Lincei, series vin, vol. vi, 1951, 375-81.
- L. Bianconi, Viaggio in Levante di Pietro della Valle, Florence, 1942
- P. G. Bietenholz, Pietro della Valle 1586-1652: Studien zur Oeschichte der Orientkenntnis und des Orientbildes im Abendlande,
Basel-Stuttgart, 1962
- Wilfrid Blunt, Pietro's pilgrimage: a journey to India and back at the beginning of the seventeenth century, London,
1953.
- I. Ciampi, Della vita e delle opera di Pietro della Valle, il Pellegrino, Rome, 1880
- E. Rossi, ' Pietro della Valle orientalista romano (1586-1652) ', Oriente Moderno, XXXIII, 1953, 49-64
- ________, 'Versi turchi e altri scritti inediti di Pietro della Valle', Rivista degli Studi Orientali, xxn, 1947, 92-8
A complete edition of della Valle's letters to Mario Schipano is by G. Gancia, Viaggi di Pietro della Valle, il Pellegrino,
Brighton, 1843
Other letters from Persia have been edited by F. Gaeta and L. Lockhart, viaggi di Pietro della Valle: Lettere dalla Persia,
vol. I, Rome, 1972.
John Gurney has two informative articles on della Valle: One is J. D. Gurney. “Pietro della Valle: The Limits of Perception”
in Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies, Vol. 49 (1986), no. 1, pp. 103-116; the other one is his entry in the
Encyclopedia
Iranica
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