ABSTRACT
The purpose of this chapter is to trace the cultural significance of an experience that was unique in the sixteenth century – the creation of the Tipografia Medicea Orientale in Rome – and to trace some Arabic and Latin manuscripts that circulated in Europe, mostly between Rome and Florence, over a period of about a hundred years between the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The Medici Typography, established in Rome in 1584, was the cultural project of scholars such as Domenico Basa and Giovanni Battista Raimondi. The manuscripts collected from Greece and the Levant, the volumes printed in Rome at the end of the sixteenth century, finally arrived in Florence about a century later as a result of the inexhaustible curiosity of Antonio Magliabechi.
