Rare Utrecht edition of an anti-Jesuit satire on the adventures of the unhappy Italian Lucio Rozelli (d. 1719), with beautifully engraved plates. Rozelli was born in Naples, but travelled through Europe and eventually settled in Utrecht, in the Netherlands, where he ran a coffee house. He experienced numerous misfortunes and disasters along the way, was enslaved by the Turks, lived in a monastery, and later converted to Judaism. This popular and rather naughty picaresque novel is now quite rare, with only two copies of the present edition recorded in the Dutch Short Title Catalogue (STCN).
The work was first published in French in 1708 (Paris = Hollande) and 1709 (Amsterdam) as LInfortuné Napolitain ou Les Aventures du Seigneur Rozelli, and was soon translated into English, Dutch, and German. The first Dutch edition was published in 1710 at the same printer as the present second edition. The third and fourth editions appeared respectively in 1722 and 1725, also at Jakob van Poolsum. The last French edition was published in 1781 in 4 volumes. A pseudo-Rozelli story was published at the Hague in 1722.
With a printed note from the city archive in The Hague about Rozelli's death, dated 16 January 1956, inserted at the front of the work, and an annotation in French on the first free flyleaf. The spine is somewhat worn, with a hole in the middle, the edges and corners of the boards are somewhat scuffed, the boards are rubbed, the joints are splitting at the head, but the structural integrity of the binding is still intact. The work is somewhat browned throughout, the lower left blank corner of the frontispiece has been torn off. Otherwise in good condition. Buisman 1739-42 (Dutch eds. of 1710, 1716, 1722 and 1725); Muller 157; Scheepers II, 666; STCN 237342464 (2 copies, does not mention the 3rd part for this ed.); Waller 1263; cf. Gay-Lemmonnyer II, col. 658 (French eds.).