Una miscellanea appartenuta a Marino Becichemo (Mantova, Biblioteca Comunale Teresiana, Incunabolo 803)

The miscellany known as Incunabolo 803, now conserved in the Biblioteca Comunale Teresiana, Mantua, was originally owned by Marinus Becichemus, a distinguished humanist born in Albania in 1468 who became a Latin grammar teacher in the public schools of Brescia and Venice and later taught rhetoric at the University of Padua. The miscellany contains fourteen printed books and one manuscript, mostly written by Becichemus’s friends and fellow humanists. A close examination of these texts, supported by relevant known and hitherto unknown archival sources, suggests new considerations about the biography and the library of this man of letters. New light is also thrown on his troubled relationship with the Britannici brothers, printers in Brescia, who deeply disappointed his expectations and caused him to turn to the activist editor Matteo Moreto in Venice.