Music-selling in seventeenth-century Rome: three new inventories from Franzini’s bookshops 1621, 1633, 1686

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While various research projects over the past decades have highlighted the status of music printing and publishing in Rome in the late Renaissance and Baroque period, still largely unexplained is the mechanism by which music was distributed from the printer to the public. In 1989, Tim Carter, the first to point out this lacuna, published his investigations on late Renaissance Florence (Music and letters, lxx, pp. 483–504). The present study aims at providing a similar investigation on Rome, covering also the entire seventeenth century. Indeed, archive research has successfully turned up as many as four inventories for the Franzini bookshop, the principal book-sellers and publishers then operating in Rome, whose published works included a famous illustrated guide to the city: they refer to the years 1586, 1621, 1633 and 1686 respectively, only the first of which has already been published (Recercare, xvi, 2004, pp. 69–112: 89–98). Together with the catalogue printed in 1676 – again for the Franzini, republished in 1984 by Oscar Mischiati – they throw further light on the evolution, during the said century, of the following four points: (1) the sector’s economic status; (2) the provenance of the volumes and, in particular, the extent of exchanges with non-Italian publishers; (3) the ratio between sacred and secular scores on sale (and therefore the market at which booksellers aimed); (4) the chronological spread of the repertory. As in other inventories of the kind, indications have also emerged concerning a considerable number of authors unknown to modern repertories and editions now lost or with printed scores that were unknown: of these latter, we should particularly point out several music performances of the Barberini period, such as Chi soffre speri, La Genoinda, S. Bonifazio, Il Sant’Eustacchio by Virgilio Mazzocchi, and Il martirio de’ santi Abundio etc. by his brother Domenico.