Pietro Della Valle
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Pietro della Valle (April 2, 1586– April 21, 1652) was an Italian traveler in Asia.
[edit] 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 very cultivated man, he knew latin, greeck the greeck mithology 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. 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 freanch 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 second wife a Georgian orphan of noble family, Mariuccia (Tinatin de Ziba), 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.
[edit] 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.
[edit] Source
This article incorporates text from the Encyclopædia Britannica Eleventh Edition, a publication now in the public domain.
