Pietro della Valle

Travels In Persia, 1617-1622

A landmark of seventeenth-century travel writing-now available for the first time in a complete, fully annotated English translation. When the Roman nobleman Pietro della Valle set out for the East in 1614, he imagined a pilgrimage. What he produced instead was one of the most vivid and detailed portraits of Safavid Iran ever written. His letters from Isfahan, Shiraz, Farahabad, Qazvin, and Basra-part reportage, part ethnography, part personal confession-capture a world in the midst of transformation under Shah Abbas the Great. In these pages, della Valle records court ceremonials and bazaars, gardens and palaces, mineral lore and medical practices, and the daily life of Persians, Armenians, Turks, Kurds, and Indians. He writes with equal intimacy about politics and architecture, marriage customs and music, caravan life and commerce. His account of Isfahan-its Maydan, palaces, caravanserais, and tree-lined avenues-remains one of the greatest city descriptions of the early modern world. Despite the enormous popularity of Viaggi in the seventeenth century, no complete English translation has ever existed. Drawing on the authoritative two-volume 1843 Brighton edition, Willem Floor has translated and annotated every letter concerning Iran, including della Valle's Baghdad letters and materials from Muscat and Basra when relevant. The result is a monumental work: over 1,100 pages of translated text-57 percent of the original Viaggi-presented with meticulous notes, modernized place and personal names, and a detailed index and bibliography. Elegant, intimate, and encyclopaedic, Travels in Persia, 1617 to 1622 of Pietro della Valle opens an unparalleled window onto Safavid Iran and stands as an indispensable source for historians, scholars, and general readers fascinated by the early modern Middle East.